OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, 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.
