The environmental and sociocultural origins and chronology of catastrophic events like the Great Irish Famine often remain poorly understood, and sometimes challenged by emerging multi-proxy data, due to methodological deficiencies and accepted narratives that are often structured by emotive and nationalistic accounts. This project aims to harness new advances to address these issues and unlock the entwined landscape and demographic dimensions of this catastrophe have long been central to anti-colonial and nationalistic narratives of identity and belonging. In turn, because regarded as relict and thus memorialized in the modern countryside, popular perceptions and present-day cultural management strategies curate such frameworks. Yet many accounts of aspects of heritage enmeshed in famine or catastrophic events globally, highlight a dearth of material remains framing commemorative strategies for human experience as key inhibitors for transnational heritages of famines. This project addresses these issues by (i) developing leading-edge methodological advancements, which (ii) facilitate novel and never-before-possible narratives of the material, social-ecological and biological contexts of Famine. 
 
While Landscapes of Catastrophe is a project grounded in the long-term setting and impact of the Great Irish Famine, the novel framework it develops can be used for characterizing broader social, cultural and environmental legacies of mass demographic catastrophes through an interdisciplinary lens. To do so it harnesses the transformative potential of novel methodologies at the interface of the humanities and sciences, using bio-geochemistry, palaeoecology, geoforensics and geochronology, alongside more traditional cultural approaches to landscape, material culture and paleoenvironmental reconstruction. This will resolve chronologies and trajectories for human-animal-environment relationships in the recent past, which are of major significance for addressing the social-ecological, biological and socio-economic impacts of catastrophic events globally. The ability of archaeological data to contribute to 18th–20th century analyses specifically, however, is often impeded by an inability to produce highly-constrained chronologies localising key environmental, biological and material changes. Our novel approach addresses this central global issue by deploying QUB’s state-of-the-art geochronology facility, to combine Pb-210, C-14 (radiocarbon) wiggle-matching and tephrochronology for integrated and holistic age-modelling. Moreover, the project capitalizes on an urgent and acute window for deploying Pb-210 to this end, resulting in a new method for studying environmental and material change in a global setting that can be transformational for several disciplines, and for the resonance of historic data with present-day discourses surrounding climate change, mitigation strategies, and human resilience.
 
Case studies consciously span different landscape, environmental, socio-religious and socio-economic areas, setting results in longer-term contexts to facilitate analysis of continuity/disjuncture, but also dynamic adjustments at local scales not yet accounted for in analyses of the Famine or its impacts. These include:

•    Western Connemara
•    North Antrim
•    Central Kildare
•    Central Fermanagh
•    Dingle Peninsula
•    West Donegal

These rich case studies alongside our novel approach allows us to test the role of resilience or anti-fragility frameworks proposed by recent analyses in empirically rich and highly constrained datasets. Our approach to building narratives of human-animal relationships in wider environmental contexts bottom-up from localised case studies can present powerful rejoinders to these analyses, creating space and data capable of intersectional narratives for formative but catastrophic events.