Harvey Weiss is professor of Near Eastern archaeology in the departments of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He was educated in New York City, at Stuyvesant High School (1961) and City College (B.A., 1966), and then went on to graduate study in archaeology, anthropology and ancient Near Eastern languages at the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1976).

       From 1968 to 1973 Weiss excavated at and directed a variety of prehistoric and early historic archaeological sites in western Iran, including Hajji Firuz, Godin Tepe, Hasanlu and Qabr Sheykheyn. In 1978 he initiated the Yale Tell Leilan Project in northeastern Syria, a multi-disciplinary research effort aimed at elucidating the developmental trajectory of northern Mesopotamia, the dry-farming complement to irrigation-agriculture southern Mesopotamia. In the early 80s and through the 90s, Weiss's attention moved to the forces that determined the capabilities and vulnerabilities of rain-fed agriculture in early historic West Asia.

       In 1993 he and his colleagues, publishing in the journal Science, presented the hypothesis and the confirmatory data for a major and abrupt climate change that synchronously affected the region from the Aegean to the Indus at ca. 2200 BC. Since 1993, this ca. 2200 BC abrupt climate change has become the focus of considerable research attention in the paleoclimatic and archaeological research communities, with importnat ramifications for climate system dynamics as well as other environmental researchers. The amplitude and unpredictability of non-anthropogenic Holocene abrupt climate change and the archaeological documentation of societies' vulnerabilities to abrupt climate change, suggest that the global climate system be treated with extreme caution and care.

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