Person: McCormick, Michael
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McCormick
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Michael
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McCormick, Michael
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Publication History's Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History(MIT Press, 2011) McCormick, MichaelConsilience refers to the quality of investigations that draw conclusions from forms of evidence that are epistemologically distinct. The term seems particularly apt for conclusions produced by natural-scientific investigations on the one hand and by historical and archaeological studies on the other. Consilience points to areas of underlying unity of humanistic and scientific investigation— a unity arising from that of reality itself; it represents a convergence in parallel but independent investigations that results in deductions that are much more robust than any investigation would be able to produce on its own.Publication Comparing and Connecting: Comacchio and the Early Medieval Trading Towns(Turnhout Brepols Publishers, 2013) McCormick, MichaelPublication Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence(MIT Press, 2012) McCormick, Michael; Büntgen, Ulf; Cane, Mark A.; Cook, Edward R.; Harper, Kyle; Huybers, Peter; Litt, Thomas; Manning, Sturt W.; Mayewski, Paul Andrew; More, Alexander; Nicolussi, Kurt; Tegel, WillyGrowing scientific evidence from modern climate science is loaded with implications for the environmental history of the Roman Empire and its successor societies. The written and archaeological evidence, although richer than commonly realized, is unevenly distributed over time and space. A first synthesis of what the written records and multiple natural archives (multi-proxy data) indicate about climate change and variability across western Eurasia from c. 100 b.c. to 800 a.d. confirms that the Roman Empire rose during a period of stable and favorable climatic conditions, which deteriorated during the Empire's third-century crisis. A second, briefer period of favorable conditions coincided with the Empire's recovery in the fourth century; regional differences in climate conditions parallel the diverging fates of the eastern and western Empires in subsequent centuries. Climate conditions beyond the Empire's boundaries also played an important role by affecting food production in the Nile valley, and by encouraging two major migrations and invasions of pastoral peoples from Central Asia.Publication A High-Coverage Yersinia pestis Genome from a Sixth-Century Justinianic Plague Victim(Oxford University Press, 2016) Feldman, Michal; Harbeck, Michaela; Keller, Marcel; Spyrou, Maria A.; Rott, Andreas; Trautmann, Bernd; Scholz, Holger C.; Päffgen, Bernd; Peters, Joris; McCormick, Michael; Bos, Kirsten; Herbig, Alexander; Krause, JohannesThe Justinianic Plague, which started in the sixth century and lasted to the mid eighth century, is thought to be the first of three historically documented plague pandemics causing massive casualties. Historical accounts and molecular data suggest the bacterium Yersinia pestis as its etiological agent. Here we present a new high-coverage (17.9-fold) Y. pestis genome obtained from a sixth-century skeleton recovered from a southern German burial site close to Munich. The reconstructed genome enabled the detection of 30 unique substitutions as well as structural differences that have not been previously described. We report indels affecting a lacl family transcription regulator gene as well as nonsynonymous substitutions in the nrdE, fadJ, and pcp genes, that have been suggested as plague virulence determinants or have been shown to be upregulated in different models of plague infection. In addition, we identify 19 false positive substitutions in a previously published lower-coverage Y. pestis genome from another archaeological site of the same time period and geographical region that is otherwise genetically identical to the high-coverage genome sequence reported here, suggesting low-genetic diversity of the plague during the sixth century in rural southern Germany.Publication Rats, Communications, and Plague: Toward an Ecological History(MIT Press, 2003) McCormick, MichaelDuring the last twenty years, archaeozoological research has significantly transformed the picture of the black rat (rattus rattus) in classical antiquity and medieval Europe. These new data, in conjunction with extant texts from these periods, make a great contribution to the understanding of the bubonic plagues of the sixth and the fourteenth centuries, as well as to the history of the communications and economic systems linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The study of ancient rats and their colonization extends the temporal and geographical groundwork for a fully historical global ecology.Publication Climates of History, Histories of Climate: From History to Archaeoscience(MIT Press - Journals, 2019-05) McCormick, MichaelThe new scientific climate history is about more than just the history of climate. It is developing in a new climate of history; it forms one of several leading edges in archaeoscience, the broader transdisciplinary convergence that brings the power of science to bear on the human past. Along with the emergence of archaeogenetics, biomolecular archaeology, and digital humanities—such as geographical information systems (gis) and computational philology (quantitative studies of textual authorship)—climate history is in the process of achieving the long-imagined re-unification of the sciences and the humanities as it unveils historical changes in the environment.