Call for papers. Climate and Society in Ancient Worlds. Diversity in Collapse and Resilience (Brussels, May 22-24, 2019)

Edited & Organized by Paul Erdkamp, Joseph G. Manning and Koenraad Verboven The debate Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. The decline and even collapse of complex societies in the Americas, Africa and the Eurasian continent has been related to catastrophic shifts in temperature and precipitation. Other scholars, however, see climate change as potentially hastening endogenous processes of political, economic and demographic decline, but argue that complex societies did not fall victim to climate alone. In other words, a debate has arisen concerning the nature and scope of climatic forces on human society and the extent of resilience within complex societies to deal with adverse changes in natural circumstances. The debate so far has shown that the role of long-term climate change and short-term climatic events in the history of mankind can no longer be denied. At the same time, the realization has also emerged that further study must go beyond global patterns and general answers. Diversity governs both climate change and human society. Hence, furthering our understanding of the role of climate in human history requires complex theories that combine on the one hand recent paleoclimatic models that recognize the high extent of temporal and spatial variation and, on the other, models of societal change that allow for the complexity of societal response to internal and external forces. The Challenge Our conference will focus on the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, which all have in common a sparsity of empirical data that limits our understanding of the endogenous and exogenous variables responsible for societal change and our ability to empirically establish the causal links between them. Lacking precise and secure historic data on weather, harvests, prices, population, health and mortality, historical reconstructions run the risk of being overwhelmed by impressive quantities of long-term paleoclimatic proxy-data. Due to the sparsity of societal data, early economies may appear to be more subjected to environmental forces than later pre-industrial societies. The challenge is to bring both perspectives together in models that allow an evenly balanced analysis of the link between climate and society.

2021

Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. This book contributes to the multi-disciplinary debate between scholars working on climate and society from various backgrounds. The chronological boundaries of the book are set by the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic on the one end and the rise of early-modern states in global political and economic exchange on the other. In order to stimulate comparison across the boundaries of modern periodization, this book ends with demography and climate change in early-modern and modern Italy, a society whose empirical data allows the kind of statistical analysis that is impossible for ancient societies. The book highlights the role of human agency, and the complex interactions between the natural environment and the socio-cultural, political, demographic, and economic infrastructure of any given society. It is intended for a wide audience of scholars and students in ancient economic history, specifically Rome and Late Antiquity.

2019

s (in order of program) Frits Heinrich & Annette Hansen A hard row to hoe. Climate change from the crop perspective. Over the past years the potential impact of climate change on past societies has become a topic that is increasingly applied to narratives on economic history. Some scholars see it as a determinant of economic growth and contraction or even use it to explain the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. Such models argue that climate change affects agricultural output, which it, under certain circumstances, indeed can do. An important element that is currently underrepresented and oversimplified in the debate, is the effect of climate change on plant growth, especially of cultivated plants (i.e. crops). This lacuna is problematic as agricultural output is obviously strongly related to plant growth. This chapter seeks to fill this void by presenting a comprehensive overview and model of the effects of climatic changes on plant growth, both from the perspective of pla...

American Journal of Archaeology, 2017

By documenting how humans adapted to changes in their environment that are often much greater than those experienced in the instrumental record, archaeology provides our only deep-time laboratory for highlighting the circumstances under which humans managed or failed to find to adaptive solutions to changing climate, not just over a few generations but over the longue durée. Patterning between climate-mediated environmental change and change in human societies has, however, been murky because of low spatial and temporal resolution in available datasets, and because of failure to model the effects of climate change on local resources important to human societies. In this paper we review recent advances in computational modeling that, in conjunction with improving data, address these limitations. These advances include network analysis, niche and species distribution modeling, and agent-based modeling. These studies demonstrate the utility of deep-time modeling for calibrating our understanding of how climate is influencing societies today and may in the future. climate change | archaeology | computational modeling | agent-based modeling

The Resilience of Heritage. Cultivating a Future of the Past. Essays in Honour of Professor Paul J.J. Sinclair, 2018

Throughout his career, Paul Sinclair has encouraged students to pursue a concerned archaeology that goes beyond establishing cultural chronologies to formulating critical inquiries fundamental to our world and for our future. This book honours his achievements by exploring urbanism, resilience and livelihoods, contacts and trade, and heritage and landscape. In the tradition of Paul Sinclair’s eclectic multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary approach to archaeology and historical ecology, this book expands the scope of archaeology by combining the examination of the material record with climatology, paleoecology, ethnography, sociology and archival sources to address both past and present interactions between people and environment. In doing so, the contributions to this volume highlight the value of knowledge about the past in contemporary society.

Climate change has always played a vital role in the evolution and history of humanity. The ending of the last glacial period and the subsequent Holocene warming, rising sea levels and the changing access to old and new resources of food and materials was part of the force that led to the social transformation of agriculture and trade. These were changes that helped in the stages towards sedentary life, urbanism and civilization. In the present and future epochs of global environmental change, the question arises in what other ways have climatic changes in the past led to social transformation and has this any implications for the future?

Societal responses to climate changes of the past comprise the keys to understanding societal resilience in the future. On October 21-22, 2017, Yale's Whitney Humanities Center is sponsoring a faculty seminar on abrupt climate change and societal collapse. The two day event, "Collapse! What Collapse?", will focus on how societies in the millennia and centuries before anthropogenic global warming responded to abrupt climate changes. Six major societal collapse episodes ranging from the megadrought four thousand years ago to the Little Ice Age of the 16th-19th centuries will be analyzed. Paleoclimate, archaeology, and history specialists from twelve universities will provide a variety of challenging perspectives on this highly topical subject. How have societies in the past adapted to abrupt climate change, and with what success?