Matthew J. Jacobson

I am PI for the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond funded project "Surviving Aridification: a Framework for Ancient Resilience (SAFAR)" (P24-0183), in collaboration with Martin Finné from the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University. This project aims to develop a quantitative framework to understand the resilience of past communities impacted by aridification.

I am a collaborator on the research project "The agricultural history of East and Southeast Asia", with Janken Myrdal and Karin Holmgren. My current task is to examine evidence for changing climatic conditions to assess natural influences on subsistence shifts/patterns within a side project entitled "Palaeoclimate Change, the Evolution of Monsoon Dynamics, and Societal Impacts in Southeast Asia".

Additionally, I am participating in the ERC project TransRein (ERC-2023-COG), exploring whether climate change associated with the Little Ice Age may have had an influence on the Sámi transition from transport reindeer herding to reindeer pastoralism.

I am also contributing to several smaller side projects:

• Speleothem meta-analysis from SW Asia: (1) Climatic constraints on speleothem deposition and (2) comparative analysis of proximate archaeological evidence, primarily with Sam Nicholson (Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Germany)
• Challenges in understanding climate change impacts through Roman and Byzantine archaeology, with Jordan Pickett (University of Georgia, USA)
• Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE (SSE1K), with PI Helen Foxhall Forbes (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
• Climate, Environment, and Water in Late Antiquity: The Maritime Hinterland of Constantinople (CEWCON), with PI Alkiviadis Ginalis (German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul)

2022-ongoing: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Division of Agrarian History, Department of Urban and Rural Development, SLU, Sweden

Q4 2022: GIS Specialist, Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, UK

Q3 2022: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Division of Natural Sciences, German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Berlin, Germany

2022: Lecturer and Research Associate, Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK

2017-2022: PhD Archaeology and Palaeoclimatology – "Climate change and socio-economic transformations in the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East", supervised by Prof. Dominik Fleitmann (Basel University) and Prof. Alison Gascoigne (University of Southampton) – University of Reading, England, UK.

2016-2017: MSc Environmental Archaeology (Distinction), University of Reading, Reading, England, UK

2013-2016: BSc (Hons) Archaeological Science (First Class), University of Reading, Reading, England, UK

Published

Currently (15th January 2025), I have published 6 peer-reviewed journal articles as primary author and 5 more as co-author:

2025

Jacobson, M.J., Gascoigne, A.L., and Fleitmann, D. The climatic resilience of the Sasanian Empire. Human Ecology (Online First). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-024-00554-w

2024

Jacobson, M.J., Seguin, J., and Finné, M. Holocene hydroclimate synthesis of the Aegean: diverging patterns, dry periods and implications for climate-society interactions. The Holocene 34(12): 1807-1823. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836241275028 

Jacobson, M.J., Chawchai, S., Scholz, D., Riechelmann, D.F.C., Vonhof, H., Holmgren, K., et al., Speleothem records from western Thailand reveal a rapid response of the Indian Summer Monsoon to the Younger Dryas Termination. Quaternary Science Reviews 330: 108597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108597 

2022

Jacobson, M.J. Archaeological evidence for community resilience and sustainability: a bibliometric assessment. Sustainability 14(24): 16591. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416591 

Jacobson, M.J., Pickett, J., Gascoigne, A.L., Elton, H., and Fleitmann, D. Settlement, environment, and climate change in SW Anatolia: dynamics of regional variation and the end of Antiquity. PLOS ONE 17(6): e0270295. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270295

Fleitmann, D., Haldon, J., Bradley, R.S., Burns, S.J., Cheng, H., Edwards, R.L., Raible, C.C., Jacobson, M.J., et al., Droughts, societal change, and a context for the emergence of Islam in late Antique Arabia. Science 376 (6599): 1317-1321. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg4044

2021

Nicholson, S.L., Jacobson, M.J., Hosfield, R., and Fleitmann, D. The stalagmite record of southern Arabia: climatic extremes, human evolution and societal development. Frontiers in Earth Science 9: 749488. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.749488

Jacobson, M.J., Flohr, P., Gascoigne, A.L., Leng, M.J., Aleksey, S., Cheng, H., et al., Heterogenous late Holocene climate in the Eastern Mediterranean – the Kocain Cave record from SW Turkey. Geophysical Research Letters 48: e2021GL094733. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094733

2020

Fohlmeister, J., Voarintsoa, N.R.G., Lechleitner, F.A., Boyd, M., Brandstätter, S., Jacobson, M.J., et al., Main controls on the stable carbon isotope composition of speleothems. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 279: 67-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2020.03.042

2019

Altaweel, M., Marsh, A., Jotheri, J., Hritz, C., Fleitmann, D., Rost, S., Lintner, S.F., Gibson, M., Bosomworth, M., Jacobson, M.J., et al., New insights on the role of environmental dynamics shaping southern Mesopotamia: From the Pre-Ubaid to the Early Islamic Period. Iraq 81: 23–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/irq.2019.2

Burstyn, Y., Martrat, B., Lopez, Jordi, F., Iriarte, E., Jacobson, M.J., et al., Speleothems from the Middle East: An Example of Water Limited Environments in the SISAL Database. Quaternary 2(2):16. https://doi.org/10.3390/quat2020016 

Forthcoming

Nicholson, S., Jacobson, M.J., Schroeder, J., Markowska, M., Vonhof, H. and Haug, G. No simple climatic threshold for speleothem deposition in SW Asia. Geology. (submitted.)

Finné, M. and Jacobson, M.J. Proxies and their pitfalls: Paleoclimate reconstructions in the ancient Mediterranean. In: Brock, A. and Post, R. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Approaches to the Ancient Mediterranean World. (submitted.)

Jacobson, M.J. and Finné, M. Understanding the impact of past aridification on societies in Western Asia. In: Lawrence, D., Bradbury, J., Glatz, C. and Harmanşah, Ö. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Rural and Landscape Archaeology in Western Asia. (submitted.)

ORCiD

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