Paul Erdkamp - Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East: Diversity in Collapse and Resilience

This series provides a unique dedicated forum for ancient economic historians to publish studies that make use of current theories, models, concepts, and approaches drawn from the social sciences and the discipline of economics, as well as studies that use an explicitly comparative methodology. Such theoretical and comparative approaches to the ancient economy promotes the incorporation of the ancient world into studies of economic history more broadly, ending the tradition of viewing antiquity as something separate or other.

The series not only focuses on the ancient Mediterranean world, but also includes studies of ancient China, India, and the Americas pre-1500. This encourages scholars working in different regions and cultures to explore connections and comparisons between economic systems and processes, opening up dialogue and encouraging new approaches to ancient economies.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15723

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The debate on Global Warming and the concerns about the impact of Global Warming on future society have sparked interest in past climate change and its impact on past societiesnot only in academia, but even more so outside academia. This general interest stimulated research by historians, archaeologists and palaeoclimatologists, if only in response to general claims from outside these disciplines. 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, while seeing climate change as potentially hastening endogenous processes of political, economic and demographic decline , 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.

This volume focuses 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.

In the world before 1800, human societies had very little understanding of long-term fluctuations in the climate that affected their environments. They could observe weather phenomena or short-term events like the height of the annual flood of the Nile , the Euphrates or the Yellow river, or see that drought was upon them. But there was no understanding of the natural forces that drove such short-term and long-term changes. Farmers everywhere were well aware of the condition of their crops, the best timing for planting and harvesting. Temperature could not be measured, past consequences of drought or of disease were stored in collective cultural memory, mainly through the medium of temples and priesthoods.