About RES-HUM
Resilience of human society has recently become one of the most important research topics in the world science. The scientific project entitled “Ready for the Future: Understanding the Long-Term Resilience of Human Culture (RES-HUM)” focuses on researching the basic principles of the resilience of human society in a historical perspective and on applying the acquired knowledge to the present. Experts from the humanities and natural sciences, such as archaeology, art history, anthropology, genetics, geology, climatology, botany, geophysics and nuclear physics, collaborate on the project.
Archaeology, which is at the heart of this project along with other humanities-oriented disciplines, offers relevant empirical data on the social and natural processes that have shaped the mankind from its very beginning to the present day. Thanks to its unique methods used, it is able to integrate knowledge from the humanities and natural sciences, which is necessary for the assessment of human ability to deal with adverse circumstances in different historical epochs.
The goal of the project is based on the assumption that most or even all of the difficulties we face today have already had to be solved by mankind in the past. Whether it is ecological crises, the effects of massive migrations, epidemics, the negative impact of disruptive technologies or local overpopulation, it is clear that the civilizational problems of our time have their origins in the deep past. Time is like a circle in which the past and the future are like the ouroboros – a snake biting its own tail.
The project is jointly implemented by four leading and closely cooperating scientific institutions with their components: Masaryk University (Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science, CEITEC), Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, National Museum and Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The project will involve both the existing research infrastructure, such as the AMS/RAMSES laboratory for radiocarbon dating in archaeology and palaeoecology, archaeological field research stations of Masaryk University or the Centre for Early Medieval Studies (CRSS), and the newly modernized and acquired facilities such as the archaeogenetic laboratory ArcheoGen Brno.