CLUES-DECEB –Cultural Loss Under Emulated Shocks, Demographic, Environmental, Climatic, Empirical Bottlenecks– is a project that aims to model the loss of culture across space and time in order to better understand cultural susceptibility against shocks.
Cultural loss is a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in what makes us what we are and influences all areas of life.
CLUES aims to address the study of cultural loss and its impacts by bringing tools from the natural sciences into the cultural sciences by standing on the shoulders of physics, mathematics, archaeology, and anthropology. We include tools from Bayesian statistical thinking to construct useful models that can inform better strategies to understand past shocks and navigate future ones.
By understanding the mechanisms of loss, provides new tools and perspectives to identify our susceptibility to cultural loss, to understand the consequences of losing culture, and to identify the best strategies to protect against this overlooked kind of loss.
CLUES-DECEB aim is to understand past and present cultural systems in their reaction to shocks, and help prepare them to withstand future perturbations. To achieve that, we want to establish the foreground for a mature theory of cultural loss, that can be used across disciplines, cultures, groups affected, policymaking, and the general public. This would follow different steps. - Model cultural loss tipping-points - Compare to case studies - Agree upon guidelines to detect and measure loss - Share findings with stakeholders.
Culture is still ill-defined, therefore the task to describe the cultural loss in a way that can be shared across disciplines is not an easy task, as it is an overlap of different areas of research, each one with its own definition of culture, and what can be understood as a loss.
One of the difficulties to characterize cultural loss is that it is a concept that can be defined by a wide and diverse terminological landscape. CLUES will work towards mapping this landscape and setting routes to navigate it, better communicating meaning, goals and frameworks. To illustrate the fragmented terminological landscape, we show how concepts in blue, on the left side, can be linked to words on the right (red or green). Combinations show multiple ways of talking about cultural loss. The relative size of the words shows how prevalent these terms are in the literature.
Postdoc at the Department of Archeaology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
Professor at the Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University
Professor at the Department of Archeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
