Bastiaan Van Dalen

Since the start of my career, I have been interested in the application of archaeological knowledge to contemporary global challenges. Following from my bachelor's degree at he University of Amsterdam, this interest led to me to explore deep-time sustainability topics with an MPhil at the University of Cambridge and subsequently an MSc at the University of Oxford. Currently, my work focuses on the potential of archaeology to not only improve our understanding of the dynamics of sustainability but also to actively address the associated contemporary challenges in tropical forest environments. With my doctoral research, I am attempting to quantitatively and qualitatively study pre-colonial (un)sustainability across the Neotropics.

To do so, I have developed an experimental methodology with which I track environmental, economic, and social sustainability throughout the past in a variety of preindustrial societies based on a set of indicators, allowing objective comparative study on this topic.