Population dynamics and the 5.9 ka event: a methodology for relating climate change and demography in Eneolithic Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine

Summary

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 these events with changes in super-regional climate proxies, taken alone, constitutes a poor argument for climatic causality. In order to make such an assertion, it is necessary to reconstruct the entire chain of events through interrelated climatic, environmental, and cultural systems. In the context of my study region, this takes the form of quantitative reconstruction of ca. 3,300 years of demographic development, modeling spatially variegated environmental time series using pollen core data, and performing GIS-based site suitability analyses at multiple time references. In this way, the super-regional scale may be linked to the regional and local scales, and the revealed detail may provide more coherent and specific arguments for the effects of climatic variability on cultural systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• ‘Calibrating’ Palaeoclimatology-informed Research in Old World Archaeology: Data, Methods and Theories

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Spatial Coverage