On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The rise of Sumer in the arid land between Tigris and Euphrates remains an enigma. Known as the civilization that first brought us complex social organization and urban life, much of it made possible by the invention of writing, Sumer’s beginnings are hidden in pre-history. The foremost issue that remains unresolved is the development of large-scale irrigation and flood protection engineering to alleviate the long temporal lag between flood and agricultural cycles. New drillcores together with high resolution topographic data are used here to propose that geomorphodynamic changes at the head of the Persian Gulf controlled the cultural ecology of the region leading to urbanization.
