Climate Stability and Societal Decline on the Margins of the Byzantine Empire in the Negev Desert

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the absence of a high-resolution climate archive in Negev Desert, southern Israel, it has been challenging to understand why the Byzantine Empire built large towns in this arid region in the fourth century CE—and why it abandoned them three centuries later. In this study, we use dietary and mobility patterns of animals recovered from three Byzantine Negev settlements to assess possible climatic shifts that may have led to the collapse of the Byzantine society in this region. Matching stable isotopic sequences from tooth enamel (carbon, ẟ13C, and oxygen, ẟ18O) and tooth dentine (ẟ13C and nitrogen, ẟ15N) are used to trace possible changes in the region’s vegetative cover and the animal’s grazing behavior; phenomena that would have responded to climatic fluctuations. The interpretations draw on distinction between "contracted" vegetation (i.e., inside drainage channels) and "expansive vegetation," the availability of which sheds light on the micro-climatic conditions in the desert between the fourth and seventh centuries CE. The combined proxies contradict an earlier proposition that the region was wetter during the Byzantine period and that climatic deterioration caused the abandonment of these large settlements.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32736