About the Project
The ancient supercontinent of Gondwanaland has been an important context for much of Earth’s evolutionary history from its formation over 500 million years ago until its breakup between 150 to 180 million years ago. Today, notable signatures of this bygone landmass are found within present-day Lebanon – with the country itself sitting atop a vestigial Gondwanan boundary. Lebanon’s unique geological profile has proliferated extensive contributions to paleontological, climatological, and geological understandings of earth history, not least through the study of Lebanese amber.
It was periods of climate instability coincident with the tectonic breakdown of Gondwanaland that stimulated the production of this organic gemstone. Derived from resin secreted by trees in times of ecological stress, amber stones may be thought of as fossilized responses to climate change. Lebanon’s amber deposits are among the oldest known globally, and these gemstones hold immense scientific value for the preserved lifeforms (such as prehistoric insects and plant matter) they often contain.
This PhD research is situated within Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene (AMBER), a project which deploys amber as both a case study and a lens through which we may consider our own era of climate change. As an ecological and cultural artefact, amber has foregrounded extensive networks of extraction and trade, as well as a research economy oriented towards both planetary pasts and climate futures.
The project will be based on ethnographic fieldwork at prominent amber-bearing localities in Lebanon to explore how practices concerned with uncovering the geologic past contribute to place-making in the present through the development of infrastructures, technologies, institutional networks, and interspecies relations. More broadly, this study will consider how past-oriented research economies interface with the speculative futures stemming from discourse about the Anthropocene.
Objectives
As part of the AMBER project, this PhD research aims to methodologically and conceptually contribute to the development of anthropological perspectives that are in dialog with the geosciences. The ethnographic objectives of this project are designed to illuminate the social infrastructures that engender scientific understandings of our planetary history.
Methods
This project will be structured around 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon between 2025-2026, with supplemental visits throughout the duration of the AMBER project (2023-2028). Data collection will be based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews at amber localities, and interviews with paleontological and geological specialists. Collaboration across field sites with AMBER team members will add important comparative dimensions to this study.
