Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies

Series EditorsPaul Erdkamp, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

Ken Hirth, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USAClaire Holleran, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, UK

Michael Jursa, University of Vienna, Vienna, AustriaJ. G. Manning, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USAHimanshu Prabha Ray, Gurugram, Haryana, India

This series provides a unique dedicated forum for ancient economichistorians to publish studies that make use of current theories, models,concepts, and approaches drawn from the social sciences and the disci-pline of economics, as well as studies that use an explicitly comparativemethodology. Such theoretical and comparative approaches to the ancienteconomy promotes the incorporation of the ancient world into studies ofeconomic history more broadly, ending the tradition of viewing antiquityas something separate or ‘other’.

The series not only focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, butalso includes studies of ancient China, India, and the Americas pre-1500.This encourages scholars working in different regions and cultures toexplore connections and comparisons between economic systems andprocesses, opening up dialogue and encouraging new approaches toancient economies.

More information about this series athttp://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15723

Paul Erdkamp · Joseph G.Manning ·Koenraad Verboven

Editors

Climate Changeand Ancient Societies

in Europeand the Near East

Diversity in Collapse and Resilience

EditorsPaul ErdkampDepartment of HistoryFaculty of Languagesand the HumanitiesVrije Universiteit BrusselElsene, Belgium

Koenraad VerbovenDepartment of HistoryGhent UniversityGent, Belgium

Joseph G. ManningDepartment of HistoryYale UniversityNew Haven, CT, USA

ISSN 2752-3292 ISSN 2752-3306 (electronic)Palgrave Studies in Ancient EconomiesISBN 978-3-030-81102-0 ISBN 978-3-030-81103-7 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81103-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to SpringerNature Switzerland AG 2021This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by thePublisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rightsof translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction onmicrofilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage andretrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodologynow known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that suchnames are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free forgeneral use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neitherthe publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, withrespect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have beenmade. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published mapsand institutional affiliations.

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Introduction

The debate on Global Warming and the concerns about the impact ofGlobal Warming on future society have sparked interest in past climatechange and its impact on past societies—not only in academia, but evenmore so outside academia. This general interest stimulated research byhistorians, archaeologists and palaeoclimatologists, if only in response togeneral claims from outside these disciplines. Climate change over the pastthousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impacton past human societies. The decline and even collapse of complex soci-eties in the Americas, Africa and the Eurasian continent has been relatedto catastrophic shifts in temperature and precipitation. Other scholars,however, while seeing climate change as potentially hastening endoge-nous processes of political, economic and demographic decline, argue thatcomplex societies did not fall victim to climate alone. In other words,a debate has arisen concerning the nature and scope of climatic forceson human society and the extent of resilience within complex societiesto deal with adverse changes in natural circumstances. The debate sofar has shown that the role of long-term climate change and short-termclimatic events in the history of mankind can no longer be denied. Atthe same time, the realization has also emerged that further study mustgo beyond global patterns and general answers. Diversity governs bothclimate change and human society. Hence, furthering our understandingof the role of climate in human history requires complex theories thatcombine on the one hand recent paleoclimatic models that recognize the

v

vi INTRODUCTION

high extent of temporal and spatial variation and, on the other, modelsof societal change that allow for the complexity of societal response tointernal and external forces.

This volume focuses on the link between climate and society in ancientworlds, which all have in common a sparsity of empirical data that limitsour understanding of the endogenous and exogenous variables respon-sible for societal change and our ability to empirically establish the causallinks between them. Lacking precise and secure historic data on weather,harvests, prices, population, health and mortality, historical reconstruc-tions run the risk of being overwhelmed by impressive quantities oflong-term paleoclimatic proxy data. Due to the sparsity of societal data,early economies may appear to be more subjected to environmental forcesthan later pre-industrial societies. The challenge is to bring both perspec-tives together in models that allow an evenly balanced analysis of the linkbetween climate and society.

Joseph G. Manning---Climate

and Society: Past and Present

In the world before 1800, human societies had very little understandingof long-term fluctuations in the climate that affected their environments.They could observe weather phenomena or short-term events like theheight of the annual flood of the Nile, the Euphrates or the Yellow river,or see that drought was upon them. But there was no understandingof the natural forces that drove such short-term and long-term changes.Farmers everywhere were well aware of the condition of their crops,the best timing for planting and harvesting. Temperature could not bemeasured, past consequences of drought or of disease were stored incollective cultural memory, mainly through the medium of temples andpriesthoods.

The connection between environment and human cultures was alreadyof concern to the Ionian geographers, best embodied in Herodotus.Aristotle’s Meteorology , written in the fourth century, is a remarkabletext upon which much modern science is based. In the early nineteenthcentury, scholars such as Alexander von Humboldt revolutionized boththe natural sciences and the ideas of environmental geography with histravels through South America. The very concepts of the ‘environment’,of ecology, and human caused climate change were born in his fertile

INTRODUCTION vii

mind, and the powers of his observations. Von Humboldt laid the founda-tion for much of the work now being done in climate science laboratoriesaround the world. With an understanding of the interconnectedness ofthe world, ‘Humboldtian science’ as it is now called, historians and scien-tists began to examine the connection between climatic changes and thehuman responses to them. Observations, for example, of Swiss natural-ists to the advance and retreat of glaciers in the Alps began to be tied toagricultural output, since they were proxy evidence for global changes intemperature. In some ways, though, we can trace Humboldt’s work backto the Ionian geographers of the sixth century BCE and to the work ofHerodotus in the fifth century BC.

Before the climate science revolution readers who sought an under-standing of historical climate change could turn to the classic accounts bythe great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and his pioneeringTimes of Feast, Times of Famine. A History of Climate Since the Year 1000(Doubleday, 1971, originally appearing as Histoire du climate depuis l’anmil, 1967).1 The book still makes compelling reading. Le Roy Ladurieanalysed crop reports, observations of glacial retreat and the dates ofgrape harvests with great care. These were detailed records for someregions like Burgundy, but it was impossible to join them with climatedata, there just was not enough detailed information. And besides, therewere other factors, the supply of seasonal labour for example, that deter-mined the timing of grape harvests in Burgundy. With increasing amountsof precise climate data of precipitation and temperature patterns acrossthe world, historians are able to gain a much clearer picture of what washappening region by region around the world.

That revolution certainly shows that nature was a ‘protagonist’ inhistory, to quote one recent scholar (Campbell 2010). But it was notthe only protagonist. Human societies are complex things. Up to theearly twentieth century, historians tended to focus on political history, thedoings and dealings of kings and armies. Holistic histories that attemptto take account of social complexity, ‘histoire totale’ the French historicalAnnales school calls them, combine political, economic, environmentaland cultural factors in past societies. Ironically, the complexity of human

1 More recent work by him incorporates more climate data and departs from his earlierviews of the role of climate change in history. See Le Roy Ladurie (2004), Le Roy Ladurieand Vasak (2011). For the evolution of Le Roy Ladurie’s thinking, see the essay by MikeDavis (2018).

viii INTRODUCTION

societies and the increasing amount of detail that paleoclimatologists areoffering has served as a barrier to writing new histories (Bradley 2015).Mountains of complex and difficult-to-interpret data stand sentry to allthose who would seek answers in the new science.

Our ability to integrate climate data with humanistic archives aboutpast climate change is one of the most important and exciting devel-opments in History. The possibility of rewriting almost the entirety ofhuman history lies before us. History will never again be based on writtentexts alone. New histories that reveal how intimately connected societieshave been with their environments and how they have responded toclimate change have already begun to appear. Yet this potential for newhistories is neither uncontroversial nor easy. The controversy goes backas least as far as Hippocrates and Herodotus who believed that cultureand particular regions on Earth were determined by climate and envi-ronmental conditions. Egypt was rich yet static and unchanging. Greece,in contrast, was dynamic, borrowing new ideas anywhere it could. Egyptwas hot, agriculture was accomplished by irrigating fields from the annualflood of the Nile. The soil was rich, very little labour was required toproduce abundance. This abundance created soft people who were easilyconquered. Greece, in purposeful contrast, was poor, it had rocky soil,farmers had to depend on rain. Greeks were quarrelsome and competitive,yes, but they could band together to defeat the mighty Persian Empire.A subtle yet important historical theory that has been with us ever since.

So much so indeed that it is a major problem and point of vigorousargument among historians. It has come to be known by the uncompli-mentary phrase ‘climate determinism’, committed by Montesquieu in theeighteenth, Friedrich Ratzel in Germany in the nineteenth and the Yalegeographer Ellsworth Huntington in the early twentieth century. In 1915Huntington wrote an influential book entitled Civilization and Climate.It was a compelling story, complete with observations of temperature,humidity and human health, that mapped human civilization and climaticzones around the world. In direct way, Huntington’s theory mirroredHerodotus’ theory of civilization written at the end of the fifth centuryBC that contrasted Greeks with other civilizations around the Mediter-ranean. Despite the fact that this simplified ‘climate determinism’ view ofthe world has become obsolete, it remains a common critique of muchrecent work that combines climate data with historical analysis.

The central question is: was climatic change the most important driverof cultural turning points like the Bronze Age ‘Collapse’, the Roman

INTRODUCTION ix

Climate Optimum, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little IceAge? When did these periods begin and end? What about short-termclimate shocks? How did these, if they did, play a role in cultural changeor adaptation? An important issue, raised by the historian Jan De Vries,is measurement. Can we really show that temperature or precipitationchanges produced a ‘crisis’? Given the complexity of societies, includingancient ones, the uncertainties of data and the difficulties of assigninghistorical causality, it is better, he suggests, to think about adaptation.Juxtaposing climate facts and historical facts and assuming the two mustsomehow be related just won’t do. We think that the integration of histor-ical and climate date within this model is a very good (if very challenging)way to go.

‘Unless these crises can be shown to be something other than unique,exogenous shocks’, De Vries (1980) rightly concludes, ‘a skeptic mightfeel justified in concluding that short-term climatic crises stand in rela-tion to economic history as bank robbers to the history of banking’. He’sspeaking about short term, year by year climate shocks, and is correct tosay that understanding climate/human events in a longer time series isbetter with very specific models. Climatic change may have been a verytiny part of historical change, at other times it might have played a signifi-cant role. The challenge is to measure climate as an independent variable.2

Here time scale is critical, and we are fortunate now, compared to 1980,in having much better and more highly resolved data, often with the sametemporal resolution as historians work, i.e. annual.

The traditional cultural historical views of the ancient perceptionsof environment around the Mediterranean, embodied in the work ofGlacken (1967) and Hughes (1996), can and must now by studied along-side a growing body of scientific studies of environmental and climaticchange. R. Sallares’ book was pioneering in introducing a more scientificapproach to understanding the Greek environment 1991. His discussionof demography and agriculture in particular established a new agenda,which increasingly is dominated by scientific approaches and data. Thisbasic orientation has now been much elaborated and extended.3 Paleo-climatologists around the world are adding new and increasingly highly

2 Cf. the remarks by Harper (2015) 562.3 For a sense of the rapid development of the field, see inter alia Harris (2013), Harper

(2017) and Scheidel (2018).

x INTRODUCTION

resolved data for many parts of the world so rapidly that it is very hard tokeep pace with the literature even within one subfield.

Three periods of climate history have received a good deal attentionin recent years: the so-called 4.2 ka (ca. 2200 BCE) event, the 3.2 kaevent (ca. 1100 BCE, the so-called Bronze Age Collapse) and the RomanClimate Optimum, a period with inexact temporal boundaries but gener-ally understood, for the central Mediterranean, as lying between 100 BCEand 150 CE. Now there is work on shorter term climate shocks as well.An important contribution to the debate now is the study of the impact ofexplosive volcanic eruptions on hydroclimate, which in large part is due tothe increased chronological precision produced by ice core geochemistry(Manning, Ludlow et al. 2017; Sigl et al. 2015).

Koenraad Verboven---Climate

and Society: A Complex Story

With few exceptions reliable direct meteorological measurements arenot available before the nineteenth century. Temperatures, rainfall orprevailing wind directions and strengths have to be inferred from indirectdata. The past few decades climate scientists have collected an impres-sive amount of such ‘proxy data’ from tree rings, ice-core layers, glaciers,speleothems, stable isotope variations and many more ‘natural archives’.There are many difficulties in the interpretation of these data as indi-cators of relative and absolute meteorological data such as temperatureand precipitation values. But in this respect as well the methodolog-ical advances during the past decades have been impressive. The datasetscontinue to expand and are easily accessible for research. For historians,however, the relevant questions are not what average temperatures wereand how they changed, or how much rain or snow there was. The relevantquestion is how this affected human history.

Clearly climate is an important factor in historical developments.Climate affects the ecosystems and thus also the socio-ecological systems(SES) in which human societies develop. But this process is far fromstraightforward. It is profoundly non-linear. More or less rain can resultin strains on food production methods, but populations can respond bychanging production and storage methods, or even diets. The effectsof climatic events and trends depend on human landscape manage-ment. Agrarian use of slopes without precautions triggers erosion even

INTRODUCTION xi

without changes in precipitation levels. Conversely increased rainfall canbe managed by sensible drainage systems.

Individual human actions have little impact, but the aggregate impactof large numbers of individual actions can be extremely damaging orprotecting. Potentially even more impactful are cooperative efforts. Coop-eration among humans, however, depends on prevailing institutions,social structures and inequalities in power and wealth distributions.Without understanding the social structure and dynamics of human popu-lations, therefore, we cannot hope to understand the historical effects ofclimate change.

Human societies are part of socio-ecological systems (SES) that areboth complex and adaptive. They consist of different components—notonly individuals and organized groups, but also animals, plants, pathogensand even non-living elements as soils and landscape reliefs—interactingand affecting each other, each responding differently to inputs. If we wantto understand the effects of climate changes at local/regional/globalscales we need to study these systems as a whole, including their societalcharacteristics besides their ecological, geographic and climatic. Such aholistic approach is not feasible for single researchers or monodisciplinaryteams. We need multidisciplinary teams including historians, social scien-tists, archaeologists, geomorphologists and climate scientists. This bookis a step in this direction.

A key concept to understand the evolution of complex systems istheir resilience—their ability to absorb shocks but also, and more impor-tantly, their ability to adapt and change without breaking down as asystem. According to resilience theory any SES will go through phasesof episodic change (Redman 2005). Typically these changes follow an‘adaptive cycle’ consisting first of ‘exploitation’ followed by ‘conserva-tion’. During the exploitation phase the system (e.g. a polis-based SES)expands its potential and thus builds up its capital base. From a humanperspective, for instance, new land is brought under cultivation, wild-lifeis controlled, forests felled or reorganized for human exploitation; mate-rially, public infrastructure is built, production, storage, and distributionfacilities for consumables are constructed; socially, power distributionsare realigned and institutionalized; and so on. During the conservationphase the system enjoys its newly acquired higher state; land is beingcultivated, the proceeds are distributed towards elites and non-elites ….The progressive ‘exploitation’ and ‘conservation’ phases are followedby a ‘release’ or ‘collapse’ phase during which the built-up capital—for

xii INTRODUCTION

instance the concentration of land, wealth, power and technical know-how—is destroyed or rearranged—for instance through the destructionof production facilities and large land holdings, the redistribution of agri-cultural land or the destruction of oligarchic rule. The ‘release/collapse’phase is eventually followed by a reorganization—for instance a transitionfrom direct exploitation to tenancy, or vice versa; from dispersed authority(oligarchy, democracy) to centralized authority (monarchy), or vice versa,from gift-exchange of status goods to market-based commodity exchange,or vice versa.

Climate change is not an external variable in this process. An increaseor decrease in precipitation levels and temperatures may boost an exploita-tion phase or trigger collapse. Yet while it is true that human agencyhad very little impact on such climate phenomena before the indus-trial era, human interventions have profoundly affected how climatechanges translated into impacts on ecosystems since many thousands ofyears. As many contributions in this book show, agrarian-based ecosys-tems with a predominance of human food crops generally respond verydifferently to climate change than non-human determined ecosystems.Historical studies of climate change, therefore, have to include theinteraction between societal systems and ecosystems as integral parts ofsocio-ecological systems.

Historical trajectories of societal systems are far more complicated thantheir ‘complexity’ in terms of systems theory can capture. The ‘com-plex adaptive nature’ of societal systems means that they too consistof interacting non-homogenous components—in plain speak individuals,households, families and small or not so small groups—that have inde-pendent agency from the higher system. The human dimension of socialbehaviour imbues societal systems with a heterogeneity that is qualita-tively different from that underlying ecosystems, climate or geophysicalsystems.

Conceptually we can ascribe agency to animals, plants, even to thingsand spaces; we can even, as in Actor Network Theory, situate agency inrelations rather than in individuals or collective entities. But conceptualascriptions to fit social-science models should not be confused with thereality they are trying to model. Not every actant is an ‘agent endowedwith will and understanding’, having the ability to decide consciously or

INTRODUCTION xiii

unconsciously to act or not.4 Only higher-order animals are effectivelyendowed with agency in this sense. Among them, human beings areincomparably more powerful because their collective agency is aided bysymbolic languages that support social learning and memories. Togethersymbolic languages, social cognition and memories forge and expresssocial identities that merge individual and collective interests. These iden-tities in turn stimulate cooperation and inform incentivized co-operatorson their expected roles. For the same reason, however, misunderstand-ings, overestimations and even denial of external realities are built-in inour mental system. We perceive reality—even experience it to a largeextent—through the lens of the symbolic languages we use to informourselves and others, and we make sense of this perceived and expe-rienced reality by inserting it in cognitive frames built through sociallearning and memories. The current denial of climate change, COVID-19 impacts, and the anti-vaxers movement are painful reminders of thelimits of our understandings. Human realities are phenomenological, notontological. Hence, the societal part of socio-ecological systems does notabide by any comprehensive rule set governing the overarching SES.Or more correctly in terms of systems theory: the rule sets governingsocio-ecological systems are predictive, not deterministic.

For instance, as Tim Soens (2018) argued for coastal communities inearly modern Flanders to understand societal change we cannot look onlyat the systemic level to understand the supposed resilience or breakdownof the system. We need to factor in the victims and victors, the losersand winners. Major questions need to be asked such as whether and howexisting elites succeed or fail to take advantage of the impacts of (in ourcase) environmental changes to improve their elite status by increasingtheir wealth and/or power. ‘Resilience’ may be defined as the ability ofa societal system to maintain its features against external and internalshocks. But the inevitable costs involved are rarely distributed evenly orin proportion to the existing resource distributions. Resilience may beachieved by upgrading and downgrading the living standards of large

4 Audi and Audi 2017: 17 s.v. ‘agent causation’; the terminology is muddled; ‘actant’,‘actor’ and ‘agent’ are (too) often used as interchangeable concepts. I think this is regret-table because the negation of the primary difference between material agents and humanagents obscures more than it reveals, but I cannot go into that discussion here; the liter-ature on the agency of objects, particularly in anthropology, is vast; for an introductionand discussion see Hoskins (2006).

xiv INTRODUCTION

swaths of the people in it, by destroying habitual ways of life, by shiftingthem within the structural boundaries of the system—from freeholdersto peasants, to day-labourers; from shopkeepers to hired hands; frommerchants to land-owners; and so on… Unless we realize this and includeit in our research questionnaire, the definition of resilience covers updynamics that profoundly impact how societies change or not in responseto climate change.

In addition to societal subsystems, such as villages or clans, societiescomprise also ‘classes’, ‘status groups, ‘orders’, ‘races’ and other socialcategories. These are useful conceptual labels because they express similar-ities in individual or small-group behaviour that derive from the positionof people and groups within social structures. As such the labels denotereal-world phenomena, valid subjects of research in themselves, determi-nants of a system’s overall behaviour and thus components of the system.Yet they are not themselves subsystems. Although similarities may be iden-tified in the behaviour of the agents belonging to a specific class, statuscategory or order, they do not per se interact more with their ‘likes’than with agents belonging to different categories—servants, masters, co-workers, bosses, soldiers, officers and so on. Members of the same classmay live in different, even distant, communities with little or no inter-secting social networks to connect them. The labels denote componentsof socio-cultural (sub)systems that cross through and interact with soci-etal subsystems. In studying impacts of climate change, culture is part ofthe equation as much as precipitation levels are.

Systemic behaviour is guided by rule sets (Verboven 2021). In complexadaptive systems, however, different rule sets are at work. Obviouslynatural laws drive climate change—cloud formations, winds, precipitationand so on—but these are only a small part of the story of human climatehistory. Social rules and institutions drive how humans impact ecosystemsand how they respond or fail to respond to climate change. Contrary tothe laws of physics, this drive is not deterministic. Natural laws deter-mine natural events—how matter and energy change or not. Social rulespredict social events—how human beings act or not. These predictionsare never absolute. They depend on circumstances that are often unpre-dictable. Shared social rules and institutions are road maps that allowhumans to navigate themselves and others towards and along values andinterests, and to predict how others will do the same. But social rulesonly exist because they are played out by agents who have a choice—evenif it sometimes means suffering or death. This playing out of rules not

INTRODUCTION xv

only depends on how well the agents understand the rules by which theyand others are expected to play. Agents can choose or feel constrained toplay out, ignore or break rules in specific situational contexts according tothe social roles in which they feel cast, but also according to the personalor collective interests they perceive. They have memories that affect howsituations are interpreted, anticipations regarding the outcome of theirand other agents’ actions, and hopes and fears of future events—real orimagined.

The structural position of agents within a system affects their behaviourand the rule sets they choose to follow or deviate from. Partly this isthe case because the position in which a person—or a collective—situateshimself and others affects the social roles and expectations inherent inthat position (their gender or social or economic class for instance). Partlyalso this is because resource endowments and flows are tied up with socialstructures. Purposeful action may fail or be impossible not because peoplefail to see what needs to be done, but because they lack the means to acteffectively.

What does all this mean for human climate history? It means that weneed to ask not just how the impact of climate change on ecosystemsmight have affected the socio-ecological systems of past societies. Weneed to ask how social structures, institutions, resource endowments andculture were affected by and responded to climate change impacts andwe need to ask how they—driven by dynamics that cannot be reduced toclimate events—impacted both directly and indirectly (via their societalsystems) on ecosystems.

Paul Erdkamp---Climate and Society:

Studying Ancient Worlds

The impact of climate change on society is in part a question of temporalscale. It has been pointed out that on the scale of the entire Holocene(which started after the last Glacial Period about 11,700 years ago),there seems to be no correlation between climate and society. The long-term climatic trend over the Holocene up to twentieth century (when,according to some, the Anthropocene began) was one of decreasingtemperature and humidity, as the climate in western Eurasia was colderand drier at the end of the Holocene than in its first half. Despitefluctuations and geographical variations this general long-term trend isclear. However, population levels, societal complexity and life expectancy

xvi INTRODUCTION

increased significantly between those two points in time (Roberts et al.2019, 15), again with much fluctuation and variation, but undeniablyso. In short, the long-term trend did not constrain the developmentof humankind quantitatively or qualitatively. Nobody would want toconclude that humans fare better in colder and drier conditions, sothe conclusion must be that societies were resilient. In the long run,humankind did well, despite overall adverse climatic trends.

However, from a different perspective the image reverses, at least forthose historical eras and regions for which quantifiable data are available.Some of the most severe mortality crises can be related to climatic events,such as the extremely cold decade of the 1690s. Large segments of thepopulation in the most affected countries proved vulnerable to the effectsof prolonged periods of cold on livestock and arable farming, causinghundreds of thousands to perish in Scotland and Finland (Huhtamaaand Helama 2017, 9; D’Arrigo et al. 2020). Despite differing degreesof vulnerability, societies clearly were susceptible to weather extremes thatcaused harvest failures or floods. But also the demographic impact of theseyears of extreme weather is a matter of scale, as Scotland’s and Finland’spopulation recovered fairly soon. In the long run, the cold spell of the1690s had little impact on northern Europe’s demography, although thecatastrophic experience may have seriously affected these societies in otherways. Demographic studies of societies that offer sufficient empirical datahave shown that famines by themselves had little impact on populationlevels in the long run. Long-term demographic trends are much moredetermined by the presence and absence of epidemic disease, which makesthe debate on the possible links between climate change and epidemics ahugely important one.

In order to establish the impact of climate change empirically, we needtime series of data on weather, population and economy, which are avail-able for western Europe and China from the later Middle Ages onwards,but for few societies beyond these temporal and spatial boundaries. Ourdemographic or economic data for early societies are far less accuratethan those for early modern Europe and China, at best allowing theidentification of relative trends. Population estimates for ancient societiesare generally based on estimates of settlement size and number, whilethose for prehistory are derived from trends in C14-datings (Bevan et al.2018, 2019). The results are characterized by a low spatial and temporalresolution and a wide margin of uncertainty.

INTRODUCTION xvii

The difference in the nature of the sources for early and later societiesis linked to distinctions in methodologies and disciplines. The availabilityof written historical data for early modern societies in Europe means thatthe debate on the impact of climate in this period is mostly conductedby historians, in contrast to the debate on the same issues regardingancient societies, in which archaeology plays a major role. Both disci-plines have shown widely differing perspectives on the role of climatein world history. However, also within the discipline of archaeology,perspectives have been shifting in recent decades, as processual archae-ology—at least in part—yielded to postprocessual archaeology. Processualarchaeology was characterized by the search for underlying principlesin human society—principles that were mostly found in environmentalfactors (O’Brien 2017, 296; Weber 2017, 27). Fundamental driversof societal dynamics were seen in the link between environment andpopulation. Environmental change, population growth, carrying capacityand societal collapse were therefore key themes in this approach tothe past. However, the emphasis on underlying principles and environ-mental factors made processual archaeology vulnerable to environmentallyinclined ‘Grand Narratives’, a realization that stimulated the shift towardspostprocessual archaeology, which aims at a more balanced approach tothe interplay of environmental and societal factors.

This paradigm shift within archaeology also contributed to bridgingthe gap between archaeologists and most historians, as the latter tend todismiss theories that perceive societies as passive subjects to environmentalfactors. The reluctance of many historians to accept a determining roleof environmental factors in historical processes is often depicted as aninstinctive response to ideas that threaten their traditional belief in theprimacy of human agency. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, history asan academic discipline held as one of its basic principles that all societieswere unique and had to be understood by themselves. The subjectionof historical processes to environmental determinants as a universal lawof history conflicted with the basic understanding of the drivers behindsocietal developments. History as a discipline has changed significantlysince the nineteenth century, but it is still very much rooted in the samesoil. In a sense, over the course of the twentieth century, the historicaldiscipline moved in the direction of social science, often putting social andeconomic factors at the heart of the narrative and assigning an importantrole to the environment, including climate, but many historians are still

xviii INTRODUCTION

very much weary of universal truths in the past and of ‘Grand Narratives’that reduce myriad events to a few big ideas.5

This volume brings together historians, archaeologists and paleoclima-tologists who critically discuss the impact of climate change on ancientsocieties, focusing on western Eurasia and starting with the Neolithic,while ending at the early Middle Ages.

The first section consists of four thematic chapters, each dealing witha different aspect of the debate. Reconstructions of past climates by pale-oclimatologists constitute the starting point for the analysis of the impactof climate change on early societies. An understanding of what the proxieson which these reconstructions are based can tell us about past climates—and what not—is fundamental to the debate. Hence, Paul Erdkamp startswith an overview of the most relevant proxies with an eye to the temporaland spatial resolution of these data, as this aspect is crucial regardingthe link that modern scholars draw between environmental and societalprocesses. He also notes that the recent increase in the resolution of ourimage of past climate change has triggered a veritable paradigm shift.While the earlier data seemed to point to clear-cut centuries-long climaticeras, recent analyses emphasize short-term fluctuations and regional vari-ations within long-term trends and therefore move away from thinking interms of climatic epochs.

Frits Heinrich and Annette Hansen give a leading role to an elementthat is central to the impact of climate on society, but that has curiouslyreceived little attention in historic debates: agricultural crops. Many misin-formed assumptions concerning the impact of changes in temperature andprecipitation have guided narratives of the impact of climate change onsociety. Based on crop biology and agricultural science, the authors offera nuanced overview of the biochemical processes affected by changingmeteorological conditions. They moreover warn against easy and gener-alized conclusions, as they emphasize the crucial importance of time scaleand of the vital but variable role of the human actor.

5 Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie hesitated to assign climate a determining role in humanhistory: ‘In short, the narrowness of the range of secular temperature variations, and theautonomy of the human phenomena which coincide with them in time, make it impossiblefor the present to claim that there is any causal link between them. […] I am satisfied ifthis book establishes certain primary phenomena of pure climatic history. The secondaryquestion, of the impact of climate on human affairs, belongs to another province, and toresearches not yet carried out’ (Quote from p. 292.).

INTRODUCTION xix

On the basis of his expertise in how longer-term water practices emergefrom short-term actions of human and non-human agents in historicaland archaeological periods, Maurits Ertsen discusses models on the inter-action between humans and landscapes that have been applied in thecase of the Roman world. His conclusion emphasizes that our models oflarger-scale and longer-term correlations between environmental and soci-etal processes must be based on our understanding of causalities betweenshort-term agencies.

The analysis of famines, demography and climate in Italy from the lateseventeenth to the early twentieth century by Paolo Malanima offers thekind of study that prehistorians and ancient historians need to help theminterpret the limited data that they have for the societies they study. As wehave noted above, early societies lack quantifiable evidence concerning thedemographic impact of climate change on their populations. The combi-nation of imprecise and uncertain data on demographic trends and thegeneral absence of climatic data on an annual, let alone seasonal or daily,scale makes it impossible to empirically analyse the impact of weatherphenomena or climate change on mortality or fertility. Studies into thedemography of prehistory or antiquity inevitably rely on the models thatare based on the empirical data of later times. Malanima’s chapter showshow complex the empirical study of the link between weather phenomena,agricultural production and demographic shocks is.

The remainder of the volume presents case-studies that span theNeolithic to the early medieval period and cover much of Europe,the Near East and northern Africa. Caroline Heitz et al. on the onehand discuss such concepts as resilience and collapse, on the othermethodological aspects of analysing prehistoric societal change from theseperspectives. They do so on the basis of long-term data series concerningclimate and settlement activities on the northern Alpine foreland. Whilethe impact of climate change on society is clear, the authors see thisnot as collapse and population decline, but as an adaptive response byhighly mobile agrarian societies. Their ability to adapt to challengingenvironmental situations was fundamental to these agrarian societies’resilience.

Juan Carlos Moreno García challenges the textual and archaeologicalbasis of narratives that see the changes in the Egyptian kingdom at the endof the third millennium BCE as a form of collapse resulting from adverseclimate change. He argues that there is no clear evidence of climaticevents causing the collapse of the Egyptian political system. Instead, he

xx INTRODUCTION

sees changes in state structure as a readjustment of the balance of powerbetween the central government and the provinces at a time of intensetrade activities.

The next three chapters all deal with southern mainland Greece in thesecond and first millennium BCE. A central issue concerns the end of theMycenaean palatial centres around 1200 BCE, often described in termsof ‘collapse’, which was followed by a period of lower population levelsand societal complexity. Some modern scholars see this as triggered by aprolonged period of lower precipitation that impacted societies not onlyin Greece, but around the eastern Mediterranean as well. Erika Weibergand Martin Finné analyse those features of society in the Peloponneseduring the Bronze Age that determined their vulnerability to changingenvironmental conditions, pointing on the one hand to a shift towardsgrowing centralization and homogenization in society, causing increasedvulnerability, on the other to regional variations in the extent of connec-tivity that characterized the Mycenaean centres. Riia Timonen and AnnBrysbaert investigate the pressure of prolonged adverse climate condi-tions on Late Bronze Age societies, but emphasize that environmentalfactors must be seen in combination with societal stress factors, suchas monumental construction programmes, and risk management strate-gies. Though they conclude that no clear link between climatic eventsand historical processes can be established on the basis of current data,the combination of several years of drought and poor political decisionscould have left society susceptible to natural catastrophes and humandisasters. Anton Bonnier and Martin Finné relate paleoclimate data basedon local speleothems to land use dynamics over the first millennium BCE(from the Early Geometric Period to the Roman era). They concludethat there is a clear synchronicity between land use expansion and phasesof increasing humidity, while drier climate is linked land use contrac-tions. Dry periods in the Late Hellenistic to Middle Roman periodimpacted farming negatively. Moreover, increasing precipitation most ofall facilitated expansion into marginal areas.

Francis Ludlow and J. G. Manning argue that the impact of explosivevolcanic eruptions on the African Monsoon caused the suppression of theNile summer flood, which in itself affected agriculture in the Nile valleynegatively, while societal changes during the Ptolemaic era, such as theemergence of new large urban areas, a rising population and the shifttowards drought-sensitive wheat production, increased the risks of foodshortages, famine and revolt.

INTRODUCTION xxi

Two chapters examine rivers and riverine landscapes in the Romanera. Under the heading environmental imperialism, Tyler V. Franconidiscusses the interplay between landscape and Roman political andeconomic development. The Rhine and Thames river basins in the Romanperiod offer insights into the relative impacts of anthropogenic andclimatological influence. The two cases show that climatic drivers playedrelatively little part in the environmental change and that the relation-ship between Rome and its environment must not be limited to climaticfactors. Moreover, the cyclical pattern of anthropogenic and environ-mental change reflects the complexity of the environmental history of theRoman Empire. Cynthia Bannon examines the influence of environmentalfactors in Roman laws governing the use of rivers. The Tiber in Italy, Ebroin Spain and Maeander in Asia Minor shared a pattern of seasonal rain-fall and dry summers that affected their use for transportation, irrigationand other purposes. Roman and local authorities used their knowledge ofclimate and environment to adapt their policies to local circumstances.

Brandon McDonald suggests a catastrophic chain of causes and effects,starting with volcanic eruptions in the 160 s, which spurred cold and dryclimatic phases in much of Eurasia. These brief periods of colder and drierconditions improved conditions for the spread of smallpox, leading to theso-called Antonine Plague. McDonald concludes that both the epidemicand the climate change affected the various parts of the Roman Empiredifferently, but notes that it is challenging on the basis of current data todisentangle both factors as causes of regional crises.

The next chapters focus on agriculture and the wider economy in theRoman world. Paul Erdkamp analyses the impact of climate change onagricultural production in the Mediterranean region, using modern dataon the susceptibility of cereal crops to changes in temperature and precip-itation. Changes in temperature in the Roman world remained by andlarge within the tolerance range of most crops. Changes in precipita-tion had potentially more impact, but were much more regionally varied,which is particularly important in such a varied landscape as that of theMediterranean region. Moreover, ‘agriculture’ is not a fixed system, andfarmers, as much as the rest of society, responded to long-term changesin climate. Hence, he argues that there is no compelling evidence toassume a general catastrophic impact of climate trends in the Romanera. Dimitri Van Limbergen and Wim De Clercq pose the questionwhether the evidence for the geographical distribution of the cultivationof such a climate-sensitive crop as vines can indicate climate change during

xxii INTRODUCTION

the Roman Climate Optimum. They conclude that at the moment theevidence is inconclusive. Hence, they call for further detailed studies bothof viticulture and climate in the Roman world. Paul Kelly assesses the risksthat farmers in the Roman world experienced by comparing the impact ofclimate-related risks with other factors that threatened their household’sprosperity. He uses a stochastic model and Monte-Carlo simulation tocalculate the financial situation of various categories of farmers under avariety of conditions over a period of 15 years. He concludes that small-holders and petty landlords were relatively isolated from climate risks,but that these risks were significant for tenants working under fixed rentagreements.

Changes in Italy and provinces in the West during the second andthird centuries in settlement patterns, urban life and rural exploitationhave recently been linked to the end of the so-called Roman ClimateOptimum. Annalisa Marzano analyses the archaeological data for tworegions in Italy (Cisalpine Gaul and Tuscany) and points to local variationsin the changes in the landscape. These diverse and complex micro-regional histories indicate that, while a partial and local impact of climatechange cannot be ruled out, many changes are better explained by societalfactors than environmental ones.

For many decades, uniform centuries-long climate eras dominated thedebate on climate change and its effects on past societies. Following atrend in recent paleoclimate studies that is triggered by the increasingtemporal and spatial resolution of the proxy data, Elena Xoplaki et al.move away from such viewpoints. Using the most recent proxy dataand climate models, they identify a sequence of dry and wet decadalto multi-decadal intervals in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth toseventh centuries, as well as annual to multi-annual droughts. However,they emphasize that these do not constitute ‘epochs of climate history’.Brief periods of arid conditions in the eastern Mediterranean lead to anincreased frequency of subsistence crises that formed the background forthe increasing role that bishops at the time began to play in civic life.

Paolo Maranzana notes that western-central Anatolia showed markedincrease in rural occupation and agricultural production from the fourthcentury CE to the mid-seventh century, when population and productionsuddenly fell. On the basis of a study of agricultural activity, manufactureand trade routes, he concludes that changes in climate had no signifi-cant effect on the rural countryside in the Anatolian plateau. During thisperiod the communities in this region adapted to and resisted pressures

INTRODUCTION xxiii

successfully. When changes came in the seventh century, this was morethe result of geopolitical than environmental shifts.

Arguing that the overall long-term trend across Mediterranean land-scapes is more consistent with anthropogenic than climatic causation,Dries Daems et al. focus at the micro-regional level to provide deeperinsight into human-environment interactions and resilience. On the basisof an analysis of the region of Sagalassos (SW Turkey), the authorsconclude that changes in the landscape during the period from about1550 BCE to 650 CE were a predominantly human-driven episode ofchange, but that the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ was a climate-drivenevent that set the parameters for a resurgence of human impact onto theenvironment.

Within the disciplines of history and archaeology one will nowadaysfind few ‘environmental determinists’ or ‘traditionalist deniers’, althoughthere is debate on the complex interplay between environmental andhuman dynamics and the exact role that has to be assigned to past climatechange. ‘Diversity in collapse and resilience’ is part of the title of thisvolume, and thus diversity is what we find it its chapters. Some authorsconclude that climate change played a major role in historical trajectories,sometimes even determining the fate of kingdoms. Others emphasize thatwe should not overestimate the impact of climate change on past societiesand that, in the particular cases that they studied, societal developmentscan best be explained by societal factors. Other chapters have focused onthose features of societies that made them responsive to beneficial—andvulnerable to adverse—climate change. Nevertheless, there seems to beagreement that climate by itself does not explain world history and thatenvironmental factors always have to be understood in interplay with soci-etal dynamics. If Ptolemaic Egypt was severely weakened by the effectsof volcanic eruptions on the Nile flood, it is emphasized, it was becausechanges in society made it vulnerable to the harvest failures followingbad floods. Inevitably this makes the story more complicated than thesimplistic causalities between tree rings and falling empires that we find inthe narratives that are popular in general media. Paleoclimatologists havean important role to play in the further development of this debate, astheir careful interpretation of the recent high-resolution data and latestreconstructions of past climates emphasize much greater variability inclimate trends, moving away from the heterogeneous epochs that have

xxiv INTRODUCTION

misled historians to narrate world history in terms of Warm Periods andrising empires, of climatic Dark Ages and doomed fates.

Paul ErdkampJoseph G. ManningKoenraad Verboven

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Bevan, A., S. Colledge, D. Fuller et al. 2018. Holocene Fluctuations in HumanPopulation Demonstrate Repeated Links to Food Production and Climate.PNAS 115. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1709190114.

Bradley, R. 2015. Paleoclimatology. Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary.3rd ed. Amsterdam.

Campbell, B. 2010. Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Societyin Pre-industrial England. The Economic History Review 63/2: 281–314.

D’Arrigo, R., P. Klinger, T. Newfield et al. 2020. Complexity in Crisis. TheVolcanic Cold Pulse of the 1690s and the Consequences of Scotland’s Failureto Cople. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research 389: 106746.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvolgeores.2019.106746.

Davis, M. 2018. Taking the Temperature of History. Le Roy Ladurie’s Adven-tures in the Little Ice Age. New Left Review 110: 85–129.

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Harper, K. 2015. Civilization, Climate, and Malthus: The Rough Course ofGlobal History. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44/4: 549–566.

Harper, K. 2017. The Fate of Rome. Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire.Princeton.

Harris, W.V. ed. 2013. The Ancient Mediterranean Environment Between Scienceand History. Leiden.

Hughes, D. 1996. Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans: Ecology inthe Ancient Mediterranean. 2nd ed. 2014. Baltimore.

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Huhtamaa, H., and S. Helama. 2017. Reconstructing Crop Yield Variability inFinland: Long-Term Perspective of the Cultivation History on the AgriculturalPeriphery Since ad 760. The Holocene 27: 3–11.

Le Roy Ladurie, E. 2004. Histoire humaine et compare du climat. 3 vols. Paris.Le Roy Ladurie, E., and A. Vasak. 2011. Les fluctuations du climat de l’an mil

à aujourd’hui. Paris.Manning, J.G., F. Ludlow, A.R. Stine et al. 2017. Volcanic Suppression of

Nile Summer Flooding Triggers Revolt and Constrains Interstate Conflictin Ancient Egypt. Nat Commun, 8, 900. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00957-y.

O’Brien, S. 2017. Boredom with the Apocalypse. Resilience, Regeneration, andTheir Consequences for Archaeological Interpretation. In Crisis to Collapse.The Archaeology of Social Breakdown, eds. T. Cunningham and J. Driessen,295–303. Leuven.

Redman, C.L. 2005. Resilience Theory in Archaeology. American Anthropologist107(1): 70–77.

Roberts, N., J. Woodbridge, and A. Palmisano et al. 2019. Mediterranean Land-scape Change During the Holocene: Synthesis, Comparison and RegionalTrends in Population, Land Cover and Climate. The Holocene (Special Issue:The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demography andEnvironmental Change) 29/5: 923–937.

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Contents

1 A Historian’s Introduction to Paleoclimatology 1Paul Erdkamp

2 A Hard Row to Hoe: Ancient Climate Changefrom the Crop Perspective 25Frits Heinrich and Annette M. Hansen

3 Who Follows the Elephant Will Have Problems:Thought on Modelling Roman Responses to Climate(Changes) 81Maurits Ertsen

4 Famines, Demographic Crises and Climate in Italy1650–1913 103Paolo Malanima

5 Collapse and Resilience in Prehistoric Archaeology:Questioning Concepts and Causalities in Modelsof Climate-Induced Societal Transformations 127Caroline Heitz, Julian Laabs, Martin Hinz,and Albert Hafner

6 Climate, State Building and Political Change in EgyptDuring the Early Bronze Age: A Direct Relation? 201Juan Carlos Moreno García

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xxviii CONTENTS

7 Vulnerability to Climate Change in Late Bronze AgePeloponnese (Greece) 215Erika Weiberg and Martin Finné

8 Saving Up for a Rainy Day? Climate Events,Human-Induced Processes and Their Potential Effectson People’s Coping Strategies in the MycenaeanArgive Plain, Greece 243Riia Timonen and Ann Brysbaert

9 Peloponnesian Land Use Dynamics and ClimateVariability in the First Millennium BCE 277Anton Bonnier and Martin Finné

10 Volcanic Eruptions, Veiled Suns, and Nile Failurein Egyptian History: Integrating Hydroclimateinto Understandings of Historical Change 301Francis Ludlow and J. G. Manning

11 The Environmental Imperialism of the RomanEmpire in Northwestern Europe 321Tyler V. Franconi

12 Seasonal Drought on Roman Rivers: Transport vs.Irrigation 347Cynthia J. Bannon

13 The Antonine Crisis: Climate Change as a Triggerfor Epidemiological and Economic Turmoil 373Brandon T. McDonald

14 Climate Change and the Productive Landscapein the Mediterranean Region in the Roman Period 411Paul Erdkamp

15 Viticulture as a Climate Proxy for the Roman World?Global Warming as a Comparative Frameworkfor Interpreting the Ancient Source Material in Italyand the West (ca. 200 BC–200 AD) 443Dimitri Van Limbergen and Wim De Clercq

16 Risks for Farming Families in the Roman World 485Paul V. Kelly

CONTENTS xxix

17 Figures in an Imperial Landscape: Ecologicaland Societal Factors on Settlement Patternsand Agriculture in Roman Italy 505Annalisa Marzano

18 Hydrological Changes in Late Antiquity:Spatio-Temporal Characteristics and Socio-EconomicImpacts in the Eastern Mediterranean 533E. Xoplaki, J. Luterbacher, N. Luther, L. Behr,S. Wagner, J. Jungclaus, E. Zorita, A. Toreti,D. Fleitmann, A. Izdebski, and K. Bloomfield

19 Resilience and Adaptation at the End of Antiquity.An Evaluation of the Impact of Climate Changein Late Roman Western-Central Anatolia 561Paolo Maranzana

20 The Social Metabolism of Past Societies: A NewApproach to Environmental Changes and SocietalResponses in the Territory of Sagalassos (SW Turkey) 587Dries Daems, Ralf Vandam, Sam Cleymans,Nils Broothaerts, Stef Boogers, Hideko Matsuo,and Adnan Mirhanoglu

Index 615

Notes on Contributors

Cynthia J. Bannon is Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana Univer-sity, Bloomington. She has published two books on Roman Water Rights:Gardens and Neighbors: Private Water Rights in Roman Italy (2009)and A Casebook on Roman Water Law (2020). Her research investigatesRoman law and society as well as Roman literature.

Lorine Behr is a doctoral student at the Center for InternationalDevelopment and Environmental Research and the Panel on PlanetaryThinking of Justus Liebig University Giessen. She is working on marineand terrestrial compound extremes in the Mediterranean and on therepresentation of Mediterranean Overflow Waters in climate models. Herwork is part of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research(BMBF) project ClimXtreme-CROP.

Kevin Bloomfield is currently a doctoral candidate at Cornell Universityin the Department of History. His research focuses on the interactionsbetween climate, climate change and human history in the Roman andLate Antique world. He is particularly interested in using informationderived from paleoclimate proxies to advance new readings on historicaltexts, especially in the area of cultural history.

Anton Bonnier is a Researcher at the Department of Archaeology andAncient History, Uppsala University. He is an ancient historian and clas-sical archaeologist who has worked extensively with ancient economies,landscape dynamics and land use, and human-environment interactions

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xxxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

in Greece during the Archaic to Roman periods. For much of this work,Bonnier uses GIS as a primary tool and he has designed new GIS-basedmethodologies for the study of ancient agricultural land use.

Stef Boogers is a Ph.D. Researcher connected to both the SagalassosArchaeological Research Project and the Forest, Nature & LandscapeDivision of KU Leuven. His research focuses on sustainability aspects ofwood consumption in the Sagalassos study area (SW Turkey) of the pastwith a focus on the Roman period.

Dr. Nils Broothaerts is working at the Department of Earth andEnvironmental Sciences at KU Leuven. His research focuses on human-climate-environment interactions in the past, using a combination ofpalynological and geomorphological data. In his recent work, pollen datawere used to reconstruct past human impact on the environment, forareas in Turkey, Spain and Madagascar. Linking these reconstructions withgeomorphological data provides a better insight on how societies haveshaped the current landscape.

Ann Brysbaert is Professor in Ancient Technologies, Materials and Craftsand PI of the SETinSTONE project (ERC–CoG–646667) at LeidenUniversity, Faculty of Archaeology. She has published extensively onAegean and East Mediterranean Bronze Age technologies, materials andtechnological transfer in monumental architecture, workshop studies andin ancient economies. Since 2010, her research has broadened further toinclude the socio-economic interaction patterns present in the complexhuman-environment relationships in the East Mediterranean.

Sam Cleymans wrote a doctoral dissertation at KU Leuven (Belgium)on the health and quality of life of the Roman and Middle Byzantinepopulations of the ancient site of Sagalassos (SW Turkey). For his post-doctoral research within the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project(KU Leuven, Belgium), he focuses on the regional variation and changeof mortuary culture in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor.

Dries Daems is Assistant Professor in Settlement Archaeology and DigitalArchaeology at Middle East Technical University. He is also affiliatedwith the Sagalassos Project at University of Leuven. His research inter-ests include social complexity, agent-based modelling, pottery studies andhuman–environment interactions.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxxiii

Wim Declercq lectures on Historical Archaeology in NorthwesternEurope in the department of Archaeology at Ghent University.

Paul Erdkamp is Professor of Ancient History at the Vrije UniversiteitBrussel. Most of his work deals with the economic history of the Romanworld, with a special interest in nutrition and food supply. His otherresearch interests include Roman republican historiography and societaland environmental aspects of warfare.

Maurits Ertsen is Associate Professor within the Water ResourcesManagement group of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.Maurits studies how longer-term water practices emerge from short-termactions of human and non-human agents in current, historical and archae-ological periods in places ranging from Peru to the Near East. Maurits isone of two editors of the journal Water History and coordinating editorof the Tijdschrift voor Waterstaatsgeschiedenis.

Martin Finné is Researcher at the Department of Archaeology andAncient History, Uppsala University and Senior Lecturer at the Depart-ment of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University. His mainresearch focus is on paleoclimatology and socio-environmental dynamicsof the Peloponnese, southern mainland Greece. He has written synthesesabout Holocene climate in the Mediterranean and produced paleoclimatereconstructions from stable isotopes extracted from stalagmites collectedin the Peloponnese.

Dominik Fleitmann is Professor of Quaternary Geology at the Depart-ment of Environmental Sciences at the University of Basel, Switzerland.As geochemist and paleoclimatologist, he is using natural climate archivessuch as stalagmites to reconstruct climatic and environmental changesduring the Holocene and Late Pleistocene. His recent research activitiesfocus on climate-human interactions in the Middle East and Europe, witha particular focus on the Fertile Crescent and southern Arabia.

Tyler V. Franconi is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Archaeology inthe Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World at BrownUniversity in the United States. His research focuses on the economicand environmental history of the Roman Empire in western Europe. Hehas conducted fieldwork in the United States, Tunisia and with numerousprojects in Italy, where he currently co-directs the Upper Sabina TiberinaProject in Vacone, Lazio.

xxxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Juan Carlos Moreno García is a CNRS Senior Researcher at theSorbonne University, specialized in pharaonic administration and socio-economic history. Recent publications include The State in Ancient Egypt(2019) and Dynamics of Production in the Ancient Near East (2016). Heis also chief-editor of The Journal of Egyptian History (Brill), of the seriesAncient Egypt in Context (Cambridge University Press) and Multidisci-plinary Approaches to Ancient Societies (Oxbow Books), and area editorof the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology.

Albert Hafner holds a full professorship in Prehistoric Archaeologyand is member of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research(OCCR) at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His research interestsinclude Holocene human-environment relationships, social developmentsand elites, burial rites, underwater archaeology and alpine archaeology.Main ongoing research projects funded by the Swiss National ScienceFoundation and the European Research Council are related to lake-sidesettlements in the Alpine Space and the Balkans.

Annette M. Hansen studied Classical and Near Eastern Archaeologyand Arabic Studies (BA, 2010) at Bryn Mawr College and obtainedan M.Sc. in Archaeological Science at the University of Oxford (KebleCollege, 2012). She is currently completing her Ph.D. project: TheAgricultural Economy of Islamic Jordan, from the Arab Conquest untilthe Early Ottoman Period in which she combines written and (ethno-)archaeobotanical sources. She is senior archaeobotanist at differentarchaeological projects in Jordan and Israel.

Frits Heinrich is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Departments of Historyand Chemistry at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His main interests arepremodern agricultural economics, historical climate change, diet, andthe nutritional biochemistry of ancient crops and foodstuffs, in particularfor Greco-Roman Egypt. He approaches these topics through combining(ethno-)archaeobotany, (stable isotope) biochemistry, economics andpapyrology. He is also senior archaeobotanist on projects in Egypt andSudan and leads several historical farming experiments.

Caroline Heitz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School ofArchaeology, University of Oxford (UK). Her current research is focusedon resilience and vulnerability, mobility and translocality as well as human-thing and human-environment relations in the prehistoric past. Sheuses practice-theoretical and social-archaeological approaches, which she

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxxv

combines with methods from the natural sciences and humanities. In herdoctoral thesis, conducted at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences atthe University of Bern, she used pottery practices to investigate ques-tions of mobility, entanglements and transformations in Neolithic wetlandsettlement communities in the northern Alpine Foreland.

Martin Hinz is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Archaeolog-ical Sciences, Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the Universityof Bern, Switzerland. He explores quantitative methods and theoreticalissues in the context of the European Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.For the analysis of the long–term development of human–environmentinteractions, this involves the integration of archaeological and scientificanalyses and the causal identification and interpretation of environmentalimpacts on human activities.

Adam Izdebski is independent group leader at the Max Planck Insti-tute of the Science of Human History in Jena and Associate Professorat the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. An interdisciplinary historian,he focuses on the Mediterranean and Central Europe, trying to integratenatural scientific and humanistic approaches to the past.

Johann Jungclaus is a Senior Scientist and Research Group Leader atthe Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. He has long-standing expertise in the development and application of climate models.The focus of his research is coupled ocean-atmosphere variability on inter-annual to centennial timescales. He coordinates the simulations of climateover the Common Era in the framework of the Paleo Model Intercom-parison Project. He is member of the WCRP Working Group on CoupledModels.

Paul V. Kelly recently completed his doctorate in Ancient Historyat King’s College London after retiring from a successful career as aconsulting actuary. He has degrees in Mathematics and Physics, Historyand Archaeology and Classical Civilisation. He lived and worked inBrussels, Dublin, London and Paris for more than 30 years, advisingmultinational companies and pension funds. He represented the actuarialprofession at EU level at the European Insurance and OccupationalPensions Authority.

xxxvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Julian Laabs is a Prehistoric Archaeologist and a Postdoctoral Researcherat the Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology at the Christian-Albrechts University Kiel, Germany. He conducted his Ph.D. Populationand Land-Use Modelling of Neolithic and Bronze Age Western Switzerlandat the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Department of PrehistoricArchaeology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His current researchfocuses on archaeodemography and socio-ecological systems in prehistoryand classical antiquity.

Francis Ludlow is Assistant Professor of Medieval EnvironmentalHistory at the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, and Depart-ment of History, Trinity College Dublin. He is a climate historian (andhistorical climatologist) with expertise in the integration of human andnatural archives from the Ancient and Medieval periods. He has previouslyheld fellowships in Harvard, Yale and LMU Munich.

Jürg Luterbacher is the Director of Science and Innovation and theChief Scientist of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Hehas demonstrated leadership and excellence in a broad spectrum of climatescience and contributed significantly to the holistic Climate-Earth Systemapproach. He is a pioneer in paleoclimate science of Europe and Asia.He was a lead author of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report chapter 5‘Information from Paleoclimate Archives’.

Niklas Luther achieved a Bachelor Degree in Mathematics and Geog-raphy and is currently completing his Master Degree in Mathematics atthe Justus Liebig University Giessen. His focus has been on statistics inclimate science, mainly working on long-memory processes, structuralchange and stable distributions. After his M.Sc. Degree, he will starthis Ph.D. studies in the frame of the H2020 project ‘CLImate INTel-ligence: Extreme Events Detection, Attribution and Adaptation Designusing Machine Learning’.

Paolo Malanima is Professor of Compared Economies and Develop-ment Economics in the «Magna Graecia» University (Catanzaro). Amonghis publications are: ‘Italy in the Renaissance: A Leading Economy inthe European Context, 1350–1550’, in ‘Economic History Review’,71, 1, 2018; ‘The Italian Economy Before Unification’, in OxfordResearch Encyclopedia, Economics and Finance, 2020; ‘The LimitingFactor: Energy, Growth, and Divergence, 1820–1913’, in EconomicHistory Review, 73, 2, 2020.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxxvii

Joseph G. Manning is the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Professorof History and of Classics, with appointments also in the Departmentof Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Yale Law School, and theSchool of the Environment. His research has two primary research foci,the economic and legal History of the Hellenistic world, with a focus onPtolemaic Egypt, and Egyptian history in the long run.

Paolo Maranzana is an Assistant Professor in Roman Archaeology andHistory, the Department of History at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul.His research focuses on the development and breakdown of the Romanurban system at the end of Antiquity (4th–7th c. CE) in modern-dayTurkey (especially Central Anatolia and Black Sea coast) in the light ofsignificant political, economic and environmental change.

Annalisa Marzano (Ph.D. 2004, Columbia University, NY) is Professorof Ancient History at the University of Reading. She has published ona wide range of topics related to the social and economic history of theRoman world. She is the author of two monographs, Roman Villas inCentral Italy (Leiden, 2007) and Harvesting the Sea (Oxford, 2013) andhas participated in numerous archaeological projects. Currently, she co-directs the ‘Casa della Regina Carolina Project’ at Pompeii.

Hideko Matsuo is affiliated with the Center for Sociological Research(CeSO) at University of Leuven. She worked as a Senior Researcher andthe Project Coordinator for the University of Leuven GeconcerteerdeOnderzoeksactie (GOA) project ‘New Approaches to the Social Dynamicsof Long-Term Fertility Change’ (Grant GOA/14/001, https://soc.kuleuven.be/ceso/fapos/nasdltfc/index).

Brandon T. McDonald is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer inthe Department of Ancient History at the University of Basel, currentlyworking on the influence of climate change and disease in third-centuryRoman Egypt. Trained first as a historian and classicist at ColumbiaUniversity, he completed his doctoral studies in Classical Archaeology atOxford, with a thesis titled, Climate Change and Major Plagues in theRoman Period, which he is now turning into a monograph.

Adnan Mirhanoglu is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Department of Earthand Environmental Sciences in the University of Leuven as a part of theSagalassos Archeological Research Project. His research mainly focuseson how technology, social relations and infrastructure affect access toirrigation water.

xxxviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Riia Timonen is a Ph.D. Candidate at Leiden University, Faculty ofArchaeology, where she furthers her research on Mycenaean farming prac-tices and the agricultural potential of the Late Bronze Age Argive Plain,Greece. Her research interests include ancient agricultural economies, theAegean Bronze Age, and environmental and landscape archaeology.

Andrea Toreti is a Senior Scientist at the Joint Research Centre of theEuropean Commission. He graduated in Mathematics at the University ofRome ‘La Sapienza’ and got a Ph.D. in Climate Sciences at the Universityof Bern. His research is focused on: climate variability, predictability andextremes; climate change, impacts and adaptation in agriculture; climateservices; statistical climatology.

Ralf Vandam is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Founda-tion—Flanders (FWO) at the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Projectof the KU Leuven and a part-time Professor of Archaeology in theDepartment of Art Studies and Archaeology at the Vrije UniversiteitBrussel. He is a landscape archaeologist with a special focus on human-environment interactions in the past.

Dimitri Van Limbergen is currently a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow ofthe Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) in the department of Archae-ology at Ghent University.

Koenraad Verboven is Professor of Ancient History at Ghent University,Belgium. He has published extensively on ancient social and economichistory, including the monograph The Economy of friends: Economic aspectsof amicitia and patronage in the late Republic and six edited volumes onRoman economic and legal history.

Sebastian Wagner is a Research Scientist at the Climate Extremes andImpacts group at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht. His main focus ison regional and global climate simulations for the Holocene and the lasttwo millennia. A second focus of his work is the application of pseudoproxy experiments for testing climate reconstructions. He was involved inthe core group of the PAGES2k initiative EuroMed2k reconstructing theclimate over Europe during the last 2,000 years.

Erika Weiberg is Researcher and Associated Professor at the Departmentof Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University. She is an Aegeanprehistorian with a strong interdisciplinary profile, specializing in soci-etal transformations and studies of human-environment dynamics. She has

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxxix

published extensively and directed several projects that all serve to high-light the interplay between humans and their surroundings over differenttimescales by utilizing a wide variety of datasets, theories and methodsand producing a synthetic whole.

Elena Xoplaki is Senior Scientist, currently Acting Head of the Clima-tology, Climate Dynamics and Climate Change Research Group atJustus Liebig University Giessen. She is an expert on climate variabilityand change in the past, present and future with spatial focus on thegreater Mediterranean region. She conducts multi- and interdisciplinaryresearch and promotes collaboration between humanities, social andnatural sciences on an international level. She is a Fellow of the EuropeanAcademy of Sciences.

Eduardo Zorita Senior Scientist at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthachtis focused on the analysis of climate variability over the past centuries,based on climate simulations and the analysis of proxy data (e.g. treerings). The goals are the identification of the fingerprint of the externaldrivers of past climate (solar variability, volcanic eruptions), and the anal-ysis of the internal mechanisms and their potential predictability. Maintool is the statistical data analysis, including machine learning methods.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Grain field with different cereal taxa (detail, bottomright) nearby the archaeological site of Qara el-Hamrain the Karanis concession, Fayum, Egypt. August 14,2018 (Photo F. B. J. Heinrich) 39

Fig. 2.2 Sheep stubble grazing on a tomato field outside of Safi,Jordan, February 12, 2018 (Photo A. M. Hansen) 65

Fig. 4.1 The population of central and northern Italyin 1310–1910 (decadal data) and 1650–1913 (yearlydata) (000) (Sources For the period 1650–1913the sources are the same of Table 4.1. For the previousperiod, see Malanima 2002, 359–369) 106

Fig. 4.2 Yearly rates of demographic increase in central-northernItaly 1650–1913 (%) (Note The dates refer to the mostnegative yearly percentages. The trend is calculatedthrough the Hodrick-Prescott filter [L = 1600]. Naturaldemographic increase is computed for any year as:[Births–Deaths]/Population; Sources See the sourcesof Fig. 4.4) 107

Fig. 4.3 Set of causal linkages from climate change to mortalityand fertility 108

xli

xlii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 4.4 Birth (CBR), death (CDR) and marriage rates (CMR)in central-northern Italy (per thousand) 1650–1913(Sources Galloway [1994]. Since the article by Gallowaystops in 1881, I completed the series of CBR, CDRand CMR through the following sources [includingalso the period 1861–1881 in order to verify the alreadyavailable data]: ISTAT [1958]; ISTAT [1965]; Tendenzeevolutive della mortalità infantile in Italia [1975]) 109

Fig. 4.5 Deviations from the Hodrick-Prescott (L = 1600) trendof Crude Death Rates (CDR) and Crude Birth Rates(CBR) in central-northern Italy 1650–1913 (%) (SourcesSee Fig. 4.3) 110

Fig. 4.6 Daily real wages of masons and yearly per capita GDP(1861 Italian lire) (Sources Malanima [2013] for wagesand Malanima [2011] for GDP) 111

Fig. 4.7 Deviations from the trend of real wage and per capitaGDP rates in central-northern Italy 1650–1913 (SourceMalanima 2011, 2007) 112

Fig. 4.8 Deviations of yearly temperatures from the trendin Italy 1650–1913 (%) (Source Leonelli et al. [2017],Supplement to the article) 118

Fig. 5.1 Absolute and relative frequencies of publicationswith the keyword combinations ‘archaeology + collapse’and ‘archaeology + resilience’ since 1950 (Data:WorldCat) 130

Fig. 5.2 Cultural cycles from the Neolithic to the Iron Agein central Europe in relation to the size of deliberatelycooperating groups, regional variability is displayedby dashed lines according to personal judgement, LBKBandkeramik (Linear Pottery), MN Middle Neolithic,MK Michelsberg Culture, eBA early Bronze Age, UKUrnfield Culture, lHA Iron Age late Hallstatt/earlyLatène princely sites, lLT Iron Age oppida of late Latène(Zimmermann 2012, Fig. 3, reprinted from QuaternaryInternational, Vol. 274, Zimmermann, ‘Cultural cyclesin central Europe during the Holocene’, 251–258,Copyright (2012), with permission from Elsevier) 138

LIST OF FIGURES xliii

Fig. 5.3 Adaptive cycles for RT appropriated for archaeology,Build-up of adaptive cycles and nested cycles in time(a–c) (Gronenborn et al. 2014, Fig. 2, reprintedfrom Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 51,Gronenborn et al., ‘Adaptive cycles’ and climatefluctuations: A case study from Linear Pottery Culturein western Central Europe, 73–83, Copyright (2014),with permission from Elsevier) and the conceptof cyclical social resilience strategies (social diversity)and archaeological markers (stylistic diversity)(d) (Gronenborn et al. 2017, Fig. 1, reprintedfrom Quaternary International, Vol. 446, Gronenbornet al., ‘Population dynamics, social resilience strategies,and Adaptive Cycles in early farming societiesof SW Central Europe’, 54–65, Copyright (2017),with permission from Elsevier) 140

Fig. 5.4 Adaptive Cycle (AC) of the LBK based on datafrom Württemberg with phases of increased precipitationshaded (a) (Gronenborn et al. 2014, Fig. 4, reprintedfrom Journal of Archaeological Science, Vol. 51,Gronenborn et al., ‘Adaptive cycles’ and climatefluctuations: A case study from Linear Pottery Culturein western Central Europe, 73–83, Copyright (2014),with permission from Elsevier) and their latest modelusing additional archaeological and paleoclimaticproxies (b) (Gronenborn et al. 2017, Fig. 4, reprintedfrom Quaternary International, Vol. 446, Gronenbornet al., ‘Population dynamics, social resilience strategies,and Adaptive Cycles in early farming societiesof SW Central Europe’, 54–65, Copyright (2017),with permission from Elsevier) 141

Fig. 5.5 Distribution of Neolithic wetland and dry land sites,burials as well as scatter finds in the northern Alpineforeland, data is only representive for the area of today’sSwitzerland (Doppler and Ebersbach 2014, 59, dataafter Ebersbach (unpubl.), reprinted with permissionfrom the authors) 146

Fig. 5.6 Absolute frequency of tree cutting (felling) phasesof wooden piles in years, calculated for Neolithicand Bronze Age settlements in western Switzerland,subdivided by periods (after Laabs 2019) 148

xliv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.7 Lakeshore settlement layouts from the 5th to the 3rdmillennium BCE in eastern France, Switzerlandand southern Germany (after Hafner et al. 2016,Fig. 61, © Landesdenkmalamt Baden-Württemberg,reprinted with permission) 149

Fig. 5.8 Correlation of warmer and colder periodswith dendrochronologically dated wetland sitesbetween 4500 and 1350 BCE. Settlement gapswith no preserved sites are indicated (after Suter et al.2005, Fig. 37, © Archäologischer Dienst Bern, MaxStöckli, reprinted with permission) 153

Fig. 5.9 Holocene climate fluctuations and archaeologicalfindings at the Schnidejoch as well as comparisonof different Holocene climate indicators. (a) Totalsolar irradiance. (b) Alpine glacier fluctuations. (c)Radiocarbon data Schnidejoch (2011). (d) Tree lineeastern central Alps relative to today. e. Average solarirradiance relative to today (after Nussbaumer, S., F.Steinhilber, M. Trachsel et al. 2011. ‘Alpine climateduring the Holocene: a comparison between recordsof glaciers, lake sediments and solar activity’, Journalof quaternary science JQS, 26 (7): Fig. 7. Reprintedwith permission from John Wiley and Sons) 160

Fig. 5.10 Summary of the climate proxies/forces (A) volcanicsulphates (Zielinski-Mershon 1997), (B) total solarradiation (TSI) (Data: Steinhilber et al. 2012), (C) 14C(data: Reimer et al. 2004), (D) homogeneity curve(Data: Schmidt and Gruhle 2003) (after Laabs 2019,Fig. 143) 161

Fig. 5.11 Alpine tree line (after Nicolussi 2009, Fig. 6, reprintedwith the permission from IUP-Innsbruck UniversityPress) 162

Fig. 5.12 Holocene climate fluctuations, percentage concentrationof rock abrasion in drill cores of the North Atlantic,high peaks are regarded as tracers for the increasedpenetration of icebergs to the south (from Bond et al.[2001]. ‘Persistent Solar Influence on North AtlanticClimate During the Holocene’, Science 294: Fig. 2.Reprinted with permission from AAAS) 163

LIST OF FIGURES xlv

Fig. 5.13 Lakeshore settlements in the Three-Lake-Regionmapped out in third century steps from 3600 to 3467cal. BCE as well as the variations of Be10-concentrations,for the symbol legend see Fig. 5.16 164

Fig. 5.14 Lakeshore settlements in the Three-Lake-Regionmapped out in third century steps from 3467 to 3334cal. BCE as well as the variations of Be10-concentrations,for the symbol legend see Fig. 5.16 165

Fig. 5.15 Lakeshore settlements in the Three-Lake-Regionmapped out in third century steps from 3334 to 3200cal. BCE as well as the variations of Be10-concentrations,for the symbol legend see Fig. 5.16 166

Fig. 5.16 Lakeshore settlements in the Three-Lake-Regionmapped out in third century steps from 3200 to 3100cal. BCE as well as the variations of Be10-concentrations 167

Fig. 5.17 Settlement layouts and histories of Murten-Pantschauat Lake Murten (a) and Sutz-Lattrigen-Riedstationat Lake Bienne (b) (after Crivelli et al. 2012, Fig. 22,© Service archéologique de l’Etat de Fribourg (SAEF),Michel Mauvilly; after Hafner and Suter 2000, Fig. 49,© Archäologischer Dienst des Kantons Bern, RenéBuschor, reprinted with permission) 169

Fig. 5.18 The bay of Lattrigen at Lake Bienne with the settlementsof Sutz-Lattrigen-Hauptstation-Innen, Riedstationand Neue Station (after Hafner 2010, Fig. 1 and 3, ©Archäologischer Dienst Bern, Andreas Zwahlen; Hafner2005, Fig. 43, © Archäologischer Dienst Bern, RenéBuschor, reprinted with permission) 172

Fig. 5.19 Temporal rhythms of settlement construction practicesand indications of failed settlements at Lake Moratand Bienne around 3400 BCE 173

Fig. 5.20 Fluctuation in settlement activities based on absolutefrequencies of settlements on Lake Morat, Bienneand Neuchâtel (4300–800 BCE), black: felling phasesindicating maximum settlement duration <= 35 years,grey: >= 35 years (Laabs 2019) 176

Fig. 5.21 Map of the 5 speleothem datasets used in relationto the location of the Three-Lake-Region (BackgroundMap: Natural Earth Data) 177

xlvi LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5.22 Comparison of settlement intensity with the numberof dry events according to Wanner et al. (2011).Left: the respective curves. Top right: representationof the coincidence of the identified events as triggeror precursor. Bottom right: result of the significancetests against the random models, the shuffle p-value ismostly considered 178

Fig. 5.23 Comparison of settlement intensity with the δO18 valuesfrom speleothems (see text) extracted from the SISALdatabase. Structure like Fig. 5.21 179

Fig. 5.24 Comparison of settlement intensity with the Be10 valuesaccording to Nussbaumer et al. (2011). Structure likeFig. 5.21, coincidence of maxima 180

Fig. 5.25 Comparison of settlement intensity with the Be10 valuesaccording to Nussbaumer et al. (2011). Structure likeFig. 5.21, coincidence of minima 181

Fig. 7.1 Map of the Peloponnese showing areas of intensivearchaeological survey projects utilized in the presentstudy (A–D), as well as the locations of the Mycenaeanpalaces in Pylos, Mycenae and Tiryns and the MavriTrypa Cave. (A) Southern Argolid ExplorationProject (Jameson et al. 1994), (B) Methana SurveyProject (Mee and Forbes 1997), (C) Berbati-LimnesArchaeological Survey (Wells and Runnels 1996),and (D) Pylos Regional Archaeological Project(Davis et al. 1996, 1997). Note that not all landwithin the red areas was surveyed. Green to brownshading shows the current day interpolated mean annualprecipitation on the Peloponnese and in surroundingareas (in the range of 374–906 mm per year).The interpolation is based on precipitation datafrom the meteorological stations indicated by black dots 217

LIST OF FIGURES xlvii

Fig. 7.2 Paleoclimate and paleoenvironmental informationpresented on an absolute time scale. (a) Climatestability as indicated by the calculated standarddeviation of stable oxygen isotopes in Mavri Trypa Cavein 100-year blocks. Lower values (up) indicate morestable climate conditions. (b) Stable oxygen isotope datafrom Mavri Trypa Cave interpreted to reflect variabilityin moisture during the growth period 1860–1000 BC(for details regarding interpretations see Finné et al.2017). More negative values indicate more moisture.The LBA growth period is preceded and supersededby growth hiatuses interpreted to reflect dry conditions.(c) Synthesised Anthropogenic Pollen Indicators (API)from southern mainland Greece providing a measureof overall human pressure on the landscape basedon pollen data from sites located on the Peloponneseand adjacent areas (for details, see Weiberg et al. 2019a;Woodbridge et al. 2019) 221

Fig. 7.3 Examples of site clusters and resulting EPLU surfacesbased on data for LH IIIA–B (each including twosub phases) from the Berbati-Limnes ArchaeologicalProject (Wells and Runnels 1996). Kernels illustratethree different density levels: maximum (yellowshading), medium (orange) and high-density (red).Site size levels are based on the following division: 1= Very small, 0–0.2 ha, 2 = Small, 0.3–0.19 ha, 3= Intermediate, 1.0–4.9, 4 = Medium, 5.0–9.99 ha(Adapted from Bonnier et al. 2019: Fig. 2) 225

xlviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.4 Information about climate, land use and aspectsof connectedness during the Late Bronze Age, presentedon the relative archaeological time scale commonlyused in the Peloponnese. (a) Climate index showingthe proportion of stable oxygen isotope data pointsfrom Mavri Trypa in each archaeological time periodthat indicate wetter climate conditions. (b) Kerneldensity estimations of extent of possible land use in eacharchaeological time period based on sites from fourintensive archaeological surveys (for details see Fig. 7.1).(c) Calculated proportion of land in slope class 2 that islocated in the medium extent defined by the kerneldensity estimation. (d) Qualitative assessmentsof selected aspects of connectedness in Peloponnesiansocieties 226

Fig. 7.5 Comparison between Argolid (three surveys)and Messenia (one survey) based on the number of sitesrecorded (white circles) and the extent of possible landuse from GIS-based kernel density estimations (bars).For details about the intensive surveys, see Fig. 7.1 235

Fig. 9.1 Location of Kapsia and Alepotrypa Caves and the δ18Oresults for each record. The δ18O signals reflect changesin stable oxygen isotope composition which can be usedas a proxy for relative shifts in hydro-climate (i.e. wetterand drier periods) 281

Fig. 9.2 Survey projects in the northeastern Peloponnese usedfor the analysis and the location of known poleis (basedon the inventory in Hansen and Nielsen 2004). aThe Southern Argolid Survey (Jameson et al. 1994),b the Methana survey (Mee and Forbes 1997),c the Berbati-Limnes survey (Wells and Runnels1996), d the Nemea Valley Archaeology Project(Wright et al. 1990; Cloke 2016), e the Phliousvalley survey (Casselmann and Maran 2004). Notethat only small sections within highlighted areas weresubject to intensive archaeological investigation 282

Fig. 9.3 Relative climate index adapted according to the relativechronology defined by the survey data 284

Fig. 9.4 Extent of possible land use (EPLU) in combinationwith the relative climate index 286

Fig. 9.5 Slope composition of the EPLU surfaces in the differenttime-frames 287

LIST OF FIGURES xlix

Fig. 9.6 Extent of new land and abandoned land in the EPLUsurfaces as well as slope composition of new landand abandoned land in the different time-frames. TheEarly to Middle Geometric time-frame is not includedhere since we are looking at relative changeswithin the first millennium BCE and have not usedthe data available for the preceding periods. The rateof new land and abandonment in the Late Geometricto Archaic time-frame is thus based on the locationof EPLU surfaces in the Early to Middle Geometrictime-frame 288

Fig. 10.1 Ice-core-based estimates of the reduction of solarenergy (in watts per meter squared) receivedat the Earth’s surface. These estimates are obtainedby applying a transfer function to translatebetween the measured levels of sulphate depositionin the ice and the consequent blocking of incomingsolar radiation appropriate to the amount of atmosphericsulphate loading implied by these deposition levels.Forcing levels are here tailored for the NorthernHemisphere—see black bars—in which an eruptionwith a given magnitude of sulphate deposition isaccorded a comparatively greater climate forcingestimate if it occurs in the Northern Hemisphere.Such events are likely to have had a greater negativeimpact upon the Nile summer flood. The “Nilometer”era refers to the period in which Nilometer data iscurrently extant (from 622 CE drawn from nilometersnear Memphis, and from 715 CE drawn from the RodaIsland nilometer, Cairo (Hassan 2007)) (Source Thisfigure is produced by Michael Sigl (with thanks)and adapted from Manning et al. [2017]) 306

l LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 10.2 Shows the timing and duration of major “SyrianWars” (coloured bars; Grainger 2010), the knownor inferred onset dates of major internal revolt (redXs; Manning et al. 2017), and the issuance datesof priestly decrees (colored crosses, where knownor inferable with confidence; Manning et al. 2017).The ice-core-based dating and global forcing estimatesof explosive volcanic eruptions are also shown (verticalblue bars). In the Ptolemaic era, Sigl et al. (2015)identify 16 high-latitude Northern Hemisphericand 8 tropical eruptions. Four surpass the estimated-6.5w/m2 global forcing of the eruption of Pinatuboin 1991 (Philippines), the largest climatically impactfultwentieth-century eruption, while four others havean estimated forcing of at least -4.0 w/m2. Theperiod closes with the third largest eruption (originallypresumed tropical) of the past 2,500 years at -23.2w/m2 in ca.44 BCE (the size of the associated verticalbar has been cropped at -10 w/m2 for visual clarity).The Greenland component of this eruptive signalhas recently been identified with that of Okmokvolcano, Alaska, as based upon tephra present in the ice,and has been dated to early 43 BCE (McConnellet al. 2020) (Source Figure drawn by Francis Ludlow,and adapted from Manning [2018]) 308

Fig. 10.3 Image of P. Rainer (Vindob.) G 19,813 Verso(Source Copyright Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,Papyrussammlung) 310

Fig. 11.1 The Rhine Basin with sites preserving evidenceof hydrological change 328

Fig. 11.2 The Thames Basin with sites preserving evidenceof hydrological change. Civitas capitals markedwith squares 335

Fig. 13.1 Tree-ring data from central Europe showingboth precipitation (top) and temperature (bottom).Note that both begin to drop around the middleof the second century AD (Büntgen et al. 2011, Fig. 4) 377

LIST OF FIGURES li

Fig. 13.2 Portion a tree ring-based temperature chronologyfrom the Russian Altai in central Asia. b Datafrom the European Alps. c and d show specific volcaniceruptions based on evidence from ice-core data. Notethe massive drop in temperatures in the mid-secondcentury for the Russian Altai data (Büntgen et al. 2016,Fig. 2) 378

Fig. 13.3 Glaciations for the Great Aletsch glacier (Switzerland)since 1500 BC. Note the beginning of an advancearound the time of the Antonine Plague (Holzhauseret al. 2005, Fig. 2) 379

Fig. 13.4 Multiple paleoclimatic records from the EasternMediterranean compared. Note the decreasing wetnessaround 1800ka BP–1750ka BP (150 CE–200 CE)in the Sofular Cave (a), Jeita Cave (f), and Soreq Cave(g) data (Göktürk 2011, Fig. 2.9) 380

Fig. 13.5 δ13C data from the Uzuntarla Cave (northwesternTurkey). Note the substantial decrease in excess waterat Uzuntarla in the latter half of the second century(Göktürk 2011, Fig. 4.5) 381

Fig. 13.6 Sulphur measurements (~monthly) from Greenland icecores NGRIP2 (bottom “x” axis) and NEEM-2011-S1(top “x” axis). Note that the two “x” axes are slightlyoffset (Data from McConnell et al. [2018]: NGRIP2;and Sigl et al. [2015]: NEEM-2011-S1) 384

Fig. 13.7 Measurements of lead deposition in Greenland ice,showing European lead emissions and denariuscoinage (silver) bullion content. “E” in purple shadingrepresents the Antonine Plague. Note the suddenreduction in silver mining at the start of the plague(McConnell et al. 2018, Fig. 3) 395

Fig. 13.8 Failed Nile flooding (abrochia) in the Nile Delta (DataHabermann [1997] and Elliot [2016]) 399

Fig. 13.9 Map of Egypt showing the locations of cities in Table13.1 (Google Maps) 402

Fig. 15.1 GSS (Growing Season Suitability in n° of days)for the period 1960–2000 (a) and 2071–2100 (b); GSP(Growing Season Precipitation in mm) for the period1960–2000 (c) and 2071–2100 (d) (Elaboratedafter Malheiro et al. 2010, Fig. 1); the shaded areasrepresent the extent of the Roman Empire in AD 117 446

lii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 15.2 The expansion of Roman viticulture into Europe’s moretemperate regions (Map by D. Van Limbergen) 449

Fig. 15.3 The evolution of viticulture in Belgium based on textualreferences (from Halkin 1895) 452

Fig. 15.4 The evidence for Roman and later viticulture in Belgiumand England (data on vineyards in Belgium c. AD 815to 1806 from Halkin 1895; data on Roman vineyardsin England from Rees 1979; Brown and Meadows2000; Brown et al. 2001; medieval vineyards from Lamb1977; Unwin 1990, mostly based on the DomesdayBook from AD 1086; modern vineyards from Clout2013; plan of Jabbeke © W. De Clercq) (Map by D.Van Limbergen) 453

Fig. 15.5 Vintage timings in the Roman world from literature,poetry, written and pictorial rustic calendars (1st–6th c.AD) 465

Fig. 15.6 Contemporary Spanish wine regions confrontedwith modern GSS and Roman information (Mapby author, in part elaborated after Malheiro et al. 2010,Fig. 1) 466

Fig. 16.1 National wheat yields (metric tons per ha) 489Fig. 16.2 Tenant savings/debt at end of generation 494Fig. 18.1 Location of hydrological proxy records (lake sediments

and speleothems) across the Eastern Mediterranean(centre). The hydroclimate spatial representativityof each proxy record (lake sediments in blue diamondsand speleothems in black half-moons) is assessedby the spatial correlation (Spearman) of Octoberto March precipitation (EOBs gridded data; Corneset al. 2018) on the nearest grid point with each gridpoint in the area. Only statistically significant valuesat the 90% level (following Ebisuzaki 1997) are plotted 540

LIST OF FIGURES liii

Fig. 18.2 Hydroclimate proxy records in the EasternMediterranean (see Fig. 18.1 for locations). Lakesediments and speleothems cover the period 200–650CE and have been processed for the presenceof abrupt changes (breaks, see also Methods section)and the duration of the hydroclimate shift periods.Red lines show the estimated regression model.Dark blue lines present the 6-year running meanapplied to the series. Stippled vertical lines indicatethe estimated start-up point in time of the hydroclimaticshifts/sub-regimes. The statistical significanceof the presence of the abrupt changes is testedwith the Wald-test (Bai and Perron 1998); 0 vs. 3:**denotes statistical significance at the 99% confidencelevel of the presence of the three sub-regimesin the records time series 541

Fig. 18.3 Simulated wet season (October–March) precipitationsums for the Eastern Mediterranean (20–40°E,30–42°N) covering the period 200–700 CEfrom three realizations r2, r3 and r4 of MPI-ESM-P(PMIP3/CMIP5) and the MPI-ESM-LR(PMIP4/CMIP6, Bader et al. 2020). The long-termaverage and the filtered 6-year running means (in thickblack lines) are shown for each single simulation 542

Fig. 18.4 Patterns of the first two EOFs of a wet season(October–March) precipitation in the MPI-ESM-LRcovering the period 200–700 CE. The explainedvariance is 19.5%. b Standardized time components(detrended) of the first precipitation EOF pattern(PC1), yellow positive values, blue negative valuesand filtered data (10 year running mean). c as abut for EOF2, 13.3% explained variance; d as bbut for the second EOF pattern (PC2) 543

Fig. 18.5 Illustration depicts Basil of Caesarea and Gregoryof Nazianzus aiding the sick at the poor house that Basilfounded following the food shortage. Paris. gr. 540,fol. 149r—with permission. Bibliothèque nationale deFrance. Département des manuscrits. Grec 510 554

Fig. 19.1 Map of Asia minor (After Dally and Ratte’ 2011, 1,Fig. 1) 563

liv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 19.2 Map of the coring sites in Anatolia (After Izdebski2013, map 3, base map after Dally and Ratte’ 2011, 1,Fig. 1) 565

Fig. 19.3 Diagram of pollen collection divided by region(after Roberts et al. 2018, 320, Fig. 3) Periodbetween fifth and seventh centuries are marked in red 567

Fig. 19.4 Map of the surveyed sites in the Konya Plain in relationto soil types (After Baird 2004, Fig. 6, p. 225) 570

Fig. 19.5 Aggregate site area over time in the Konya Plain.“Byzantine” is the period between the fifth and seventhcenturies while Medieval is post-seventh century CE(After Baird 2004, Fig. 4, p. 232) 570

Fig. 19.6 In the black square is the rough area surveyedduring the Archaeological General Survey in CentralAnatolia (CAS) (After Dally and Ratte’ 2011, 1, Fig. 1) 572

Fig. 19.7 Diagram of the locations of Late Roman Sites(marked as “Early Byzantine”) in the evidencefrom the Archaeological General Survey in CentralAnatolia (CAS) (After Anderson 2008, Fig. 5, p. 238) 573

Fig. 19.8 Surveyed sites at Aizanoi (After Niewöhner 2006,Fig. 1, p. 244) 574

Fig. 19.9 Location of the general area surveyed by the IspartaArchaeological Survey (After De Giorgi 2014, Fig. 1,p. 57) 575

Fig. 19.10 Sites identified in the Isparta Archaeological Survey. IAS019 shows continuity into the thirteen century (AfterDe Giorgi 2014, Fig. 2, p. 58) 577

Fig. 19.11 Germia, settlement pattern (After Niewöhner et al.2013, 111, Fig. 2) 578

Fig. 20.1 Study region of the Sagalassos Project 591Fig. 20.2 Direct climate proxies for SW Turkey and the Sagalassos

region. a Lake Salda Ca/Fe data from Danladiand Akçer-Ön (2018). High values represent drierconditions, low values represent wetter conditions. bLake Nar δ18O data from Jones et al. (2006) and Deanet al. (2015). High values represent drier conditions,and more negative values represent wetter conditions 592

Fig. 20.3 Late Iron Age settlement patterns in the study regionof the Sagalassos Project 597

Fig. 20.4 Middle Byzantine settlement patterns in the studyregion of the Sagalassos Project 598

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Details of the three model studies discussed in thischapter 93

Table 4.1 The population of central and northern Italy and Italy1650–1900 (millions) 105

Table 4.2 Results of the distributed lags equation in three periods:1650–1759, 1760–1859 and 1860–1913 (coefficientsand p-values) 113

Table 4.3 Mortality crises in 1650–1855 in central-northern Italy(deviations from the trend of mortality by 40 and 20%) 114

Table 4.4 Results of the distributed lags test of monthly mortalityas a function of monthly temperatures in Padua1725–1769 120

Table 5.1 A compilation of archaeological and anthropologicaldefinitions and conceptualizations of the term ‘collapse’ 133

Table 5.2 Adaptive Cycle Model. Transition phases r to K and �

to α (after Peters and Zimmermann 2017) 135Table 8.1 Labour costs for 6 major 13th c BCE building works

in the Argive Plain, with basic dimensions of a simplifiedcircumference or shape 249

Table 8.2 Time table indicating which activities took placeper season 253

Table 8.3 Agricultural cycle tasks for crop rearing, labour costrates and labour efforts needed per task, with totals 254

lv

lvi LIST OF TABLES

Table 8.4 Selected yield estimations for Bronze Age and ClassicalGreece. Weight kg/ha is transformed from originalfigures (e.g., hectolitre, oka,medimnos,stremma) by RT 254

Table 8.5 Population estimates for the Argive Plain basedon different yields and consumption rates presentedin the selected studies (i.e., ‘Source’). The land areaunder cultivation is calculated as 20,000 ha with 50%fallow 257

Table 8.6 The estimated agricultural potential of the LBA ArgivePlain during a year of normal rainfall, and yearswith 30% and 55% crop failures (after Hillman1973). Calculations are based on the crop yieldsand consumption rates presented in tables 8.4 and 8.5 257

Table 11.1 Sites with hydrological change in the Rhine Basin 329Table 11.2 Sites with hydrological change in the Thames Basin 336Table 12.1 Interdicts on rivers 350Table 13.1 Average temperatures for four modern-day cities

in Egypt ranging in order from north to southalong the Nile (http://www.climatetemps.com/temperatures.php) 401

Table 15.1 Selected descriptions of September and October,referring to the vintage, in Roman poetry 458

Table 15.2 Selected textual and pictorial rustic calendars,with references to the vintage, in the Roman world 460

Table 16.1 Net income after subsistence in ‘typical years’—tenants 492Table 16.2 Percentage of families with outcomes after a generation 493Table 16.3 Tenant ruin probability as function of yield variability 495Table 16.4 Tenant ruin probability as function of spoilage 496Table 16.5 Probability of falling into debt by number of children

surviving to end year 15 (without allowingfor abandonment) 496

Table 16.6 Ruin probability according to average discretionaryspend 497