Wildfires and Human Communities in Bronze and Iron Age, Armenia: A Macro-Charcoal and Paleo-Temperature (brGDGT) Reconstruction

Summary

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

Humans today and in the past have to contend with the impacts of wildland fires. In grasslands, these fires occur frequently at annual to decadal scale. In the Kasakh valley, Armenia, recent research has revealed periods of increased fire activity during the Early Bronze and Late Iron Age and decreased activity in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (Cromartie et al. 2020). While large conflagrations during the Early and Late Bronze Age have been recorded on-site (Badalyan et al. 2008). The causal relationship between these fires has yet to be examined. In this paper we build on this previous research to investigate the scale of these landscape fire events in relation to temperature and cultural change. We utilize macro-charcoal from sediment cores for fire reconstruction, the paleo-thermometer biomarker brGDGTs to reconstruct temperature, and burn events recorded in the archaeological record to examine the complex relationship between on-site and off-site burns while assessing the impacts of future climate change. Preliminary results suggest that climate driven wildfires were common during the EBA and may have impacted human settlements while onsite conflagrations during the LBA appear to be limited to the archaeological site. In the LIA settlements may have escaped large wildfire events.

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): 33305