‘Calibrating’ Palaeoclimatology-informed Research in Old World Archaeology: Data, Methods and Theories
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
After two decades of increasing and often deterministic palaeoclimatology-informed archaeological research there is a need to scrutinize, calibrate and improve our approaches to climate change in the past and present. Simple cause-and-effect correlations, often on the basis of coarsely resolved time series, are gradually being supplemented by multi-scalar models of non-linear dynamics, including concepts such as adaptive cycles or critical transitions. Furthermore, mathematical modeling of culture-environment/climate interaction is increasingly applied to single out parameters or to search for alternative explanations. Palaeo-climatic time series have become more precise, as have archaeological chronologies, and with the increase in temporal resolution previous interpretations of climate-culture interconnections on a continental or global scale are beginning to be challenged and to be replaced by more fine grained locally and regionally scaled research projects. This session will present case studies of such multi-scalar palaeoclimatology-informed archaeology from the Old World, and will discuss the data, methods and theories as well as outline future directions for palaeo-climatic research in archaeology.
Other Keywords
Climate Change •
Resilience •
Climate •
Soil •
Farming •
Population Dynamics •
Early Holocene •
Norse •
Bronze Age •
Ireland
Geographic Keywords
Europe
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-7 of 7)
- Documents (7)
-
Adaptive Cycles and Resilience as explanatory templates for the formulation of coupled climate-culture models (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Simplistic scenarios of the role of climate on the dynamics of socio-political trajectories are increasingly being replaced by coupled models in which climate and societies undergo mutually influential interactions. The concepts of adaptive cycles and resilience have been particularly helpful in understanding these interrelations. Based on an extensive body of data from Early to Upper (Young) Neolithic sites in western Central Germany and adjacent regions, a model is proposed which takes into...
-
Climate change and societal change in the western Mediterranean area 4.2 ka BP (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
In the eastern Mediterranean area, coherent patterns and synchronous events around 4.2 kaBP suggest an obvious link between cultural upheaval in urban societies and climate forcing. Here, the 4.2 kaBP aridification event is thought the cause of severe economic consequences and social unrest. The picture for the central and western Mediterranean regions, at the interface of North Atlantic (Bond event 3) and monsoon-influenced climate, is different. It remains unclear whether supra-regional...
-
Exploring the Late Prehistoric (8000-2400 BC) human-environment interaction in the Western Taurus Mountains, SW Turkey (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
This paper presents a case study on human-environment dynamics in the Burdur Region (SW Turkey) during Late Prehistory (8000-2400 BC). Previous archaeological research in the area mainly focused on the fertile lowland areas, which revealed distinctive periods of continuity and collapse of farming communities, followed by a total abandonment of the plain areas for nearly a millennium, i.e. during the Middle Chalcolithic (5500-4100 BC). The working hypothesis is that people moved to more temperate...
-
Increasing the resolution from climate change to weather events: understanding past land-use management on the Svalbarð estate, North East Iceland. (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Climate change has commonly been invoked as the most major force in determining land-use in the Norse settlement of Iceland. Recently, climate studies in the North Atlantic have focused on regional-scale shifts in temperature, ice-cover, and storminess. In contrast, the post-settlement period is increasingly understood from excavation and analyses of the material culture associated with farming practices, as well as literature-based and geomorphological perspectives. While climate evidence...
-
Macrophysical Climate Model and Comparisons with the Proxy-Based Paleoclimate Reconstruction in Central Anatolian Plain between 14000 and 7000 cal. BP (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Central Anatolian Plain, which was once covered with a Pleistocene lake, witnessed major environmental transformations from the Epipaleolithic to the end of the early Holocene. As the paleolake dried up it exposed valuable resources such as soil and created marshlands where the earliest Neolithic settlements, such as Aşıklıhöyük (10th millennium BP) and Çatalhöyük (9th millennium BP) emerged. These sites represent the first locales of human experimentation with domestication and they represent...
-
Population dynamics and the 5.9 ka event: a methodology for relating climate change and demography in Eneolithic Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
For over a decade it has been suggested that several events of the fourth millenium BC in Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine – the rise and fall of the giant-settlements of the Tripolye culture in Central Ukraine, the abandonment of Gumelnița tell settlements in the Danube valley, and the dissolution of the “Old European” complex and advent of the Bronze Age – were influenced by climatic factors, notably the 5.9 ka event and the beginning of the Subboreal period. However, the simple synchronicity of...
-
Rapid climate change and demographic decline at the end of the Irish Bronze Age (2016)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The accumulation of large 14C data-sets over recent decades provides archaeologists with a substantial resource which has only recently begun to be systematically explored. Such data-sets offer the potential to explore temporal variations in the intensity of past human activity at a range of geographical scales, although the ‘reading’ of such data is far from unproblematic. One area of clear potential is the relationship between patterning evident in 14C and palaeoclimate data-sets. In this...