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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANCIENT ECONOMIES

Climate Change and

Ancient Societies
in Europe and the
Near East
Diversity in Collapse
and Resilience
Edited by
Paul Erdkamp · Joseph G. Manning ·
Koenraad Verboven
 Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies

Series Editors
Paul Erdkamp, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
Ken Hirth, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA
Claire Holleran, University of Exeter, Exeter, Devon, UK
Michael Jursa, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
J. G. Manning, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Himanshu Prabha Ray, Gurugram, Haryana, India
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 disci-
pline 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
 Paul Erdkamp · Joseph G. Manning ·
Koenraad Verboven
Editors

Climate Change
and Ancient Societies
in Europe
and the Near East
Diversity in Collapse and Resilience
Editors
Paul Erdkamp Joseph G. Manning
Department of History Department of History
Faculty of Languages Yale University
and the Humanities New Haven, CT, USA
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Elsene, Belgium

Koenraad Verboven
Department of History
Ghent University
Gent, Belgium

ISSN 2752-3292 ISSN 2752-3306 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies
ISBN 978-3-030-81102-0 ISBN 978-3-030-81103-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81103-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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 Introduction

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 societies—not 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 soci-
eties 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 endoge-
nous 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

v
vi INTRODUCTION

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 respon-
sible 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 reconstruc-
tions 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 perspec-
tives together in models that allow an evenly balanced analysis of the link
between climate and society.

Joseph G. Manning---Climate
and Society: Past and Present
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.
The connection between environment and human cultures was already
of concern to the Ionian geographers, best embodied in Herodotus.
Aristotle’s Meteorology, written in the fourth century, is a remarkable
text upon which much modern science is based. In the early nineteenth
century, scholars such as Alexander von Humboldt revolutionized both
the natural sciences and the ideas of environmental geography with his
travels through South America. The very concepts of the ‘environment’,
of ecology, and human caused climate change were born in his fertile
 INTRODUCTION vii

mind, and the powers of his observations. Von Humboldt laid the founda-
tion for much of the work now being done in climate science laboratories
around the world. With an understanding of the interconnectedness of
the world, ‘Humboldtian science’ as it is now called, historians and scien-
tists began to examine the connection between climatic changes and the
human responses to them. Observations, for example, of Swiss natural-
ists to the advance and retreat of glaciers in the Alps began to be tied to
agricultural output, since they were proxy evidence for global changes in
temperature. In some ways, though, we can trace Humboldt’s work back
to the Ionian geographers of the sixth century BCE and to the work of
Herodotus in the fifth century BC.
Before the climate science revolution readers who sought an under-
standing of historical climate change could turn to the classic accounts by
the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and his pioneering
Times of Feast, Times of Famine. A History of Climate Since the Year 1000
(Doubleday, 1971, originally appearing as Histoire du climate depuis l’an
mil, 1967).1 The book still makes compelling reading. Le Roy Ladurie
analysed crop reports, observations of glacial retreat and the dates of
grape harvests with great care. These were detailed records for some
regions like Burgundy, but it was impossible to join them with climate
data, there just was not enough detailed information. And besides, there
were other factors, the supply of seasonal labour for example, that deter-
mined the timing of grape harvests in Burgundy. With increasing amounts
of precise climate data of precipitation and temperature patterns across
the world, historians are able to gain a much clearer picture of what was
happening region by region around the world.
That revolution certainly shows that nature was a ‘protagonist’ in
history, to quote one recent scholar (Campbell 2010). But it was not
the only protagonist. Human societies are complex things. Up to the
early twentieth century, historians tended to focus on political history, the
doings and dealings of kings and armies. Holistic histories that attempt
to take account of social complexity, ‘histoire totale’ the French historical
Annales school calls them, combine political, economic, environmental
and cultural factors in past societies. Ironically, the complexity of human

1 More recent work by him incorporates more climate data and departs from his earlier
views of the role of climate change in history. See Le Roy Ladurie (2004), Le Roy Ladurie
and Vasak (2011). For the evolution of Le Roy Ladurie’s thinking, see the essay by Mike
Davis (2018).
viii INTRODUCTION

societies and the increasing amount of detail that paleoclimatologists are

offering has served as a barrier to writing new histories (Bradley 2015).
Mountains of complex and difficult-to-interpret data stand sentry to all
those who would seek answers in the new science.
Our ability to integrate climate data with humanistic archives about
past climate change is one of the most important and exciting devel-
opments in History. The possibility of rewriting almost the entirety of
human history lies before us. History will never again be based on written
texts alone. New histories that reveal how intimately connected societies
have been with their environments and how they have responded to
climate change have already begun to appear. Yet this potential for new
histories is neither uncontroversial nor easy. The controversy goes back
as least as far as Hippocrates and Herodotus who believed that culture
and particular regions on Earth were determined by climate and envi-
ronmental conditions. Egypt was rich yet static and unchanging. Greece,
in contrast, was dynamic, borrowing new ideas anywhere it could. Egypt
was hot, agriculture was accomplished by irrigating fields from the annual
flood of the Nile. The soil was rich, very little labour was required to
produce abundance. This abundance created soft people who were easily
conquered. Greece, in purposeful contrast, was poor, it had rocky soil,
farmers had to depend on rain. Greeks were quarrelsome and competitive,
yes, but they could band together to defeat the mighty Persian Empire.
A subtle yet important historical theory that has been with us ever since.
So much so indeed that it is a major problem and point of vigorous
argument among historians. It has come to be known by the uncompli-
mentary phrase ‘climate determinism’, committed by Montesquieu in the
eighteenth, Friedrich Ratzel in Germany in the nineteenth and the Yale
geographer Ellsworth Huntington in the early twentieth century. In 1915
Huntington wrote an influential book entitled Civilization and Climate.
It was a compelling story, complete with observations of temperature,
humidity and human health, that mapped human civilization and climatic
zones around the world. In direct way, Huntington’s theory mirrored
Herodotus’ theory of civilization written at the end of the fifth century
BC that contrasted Greeks with other civilizations around the Mediter-
ranean. Despite the fact that this simplified ‘climate determinism’ view of
the world has become obsolete, it remains a common critique of much
recent work that combines climate data with historical analysis.
The central question is: was climatic change the most important driver
of cultural turning points like the Bronze Age ‘Collapse’, the Roman
 INTRODUCTION ix

Climate Optimum, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice
Age? When did these periods begin and end? What about short-term
climate shocks? How did these, if they did, play a role in cultural change
or adaptation? An important issue, raised by the historian Jan De Vries,
is measurement. Can we really show that temperature or precipitation
changes produced a ‘crisis’? Given the complexity of societies, including
ancient ones, the uncertainties of data and the difficulties of assigning
historical causality, it is better, he suggests, to think about adaptation.
Juxtaposing climate facts and historical facts and assuming the two must
somehow be related just won’t do. We think that the integration of histor-
ical and climate date within this model is a very good (if very challenging)
way to go.
‘Unless these crises can be shown to be something other than unique,
exogenous shocks’, De Vries (1980) rightly concludes, ‘a skeptic might
feel justified in concluding that short-term climatic crises stand in rela-
tion to economic history as bank robbers to the history of banking’. He’s
speaking about short term, year by year climate shocks, and is correct to
say that understanding climate/human events in a longer time series is
better with very specific models. Climatic change may have been a very
tiny part of historical change, at other times it might have played a signifi-
cant role. The challenge is to measure climate as an independent variable.2
Here time scale is critical, and we are fortunate now, compared to 1980,
in having much better and more highly resolved data, often with the same
temporal resolution as historians work, i.e. annual.
The traditional cultural historical views of the ancient perceptions
of environment around the Mediterranean, embodied in the work of
Glacken (1967) and Hughes (1996), can and must now by studied along-
side a growing body of scientific studies of environmental and climatic
change. R. Sallares’ book was pioneering in introducing a more scientific
approach to understanding the Greek environment 1991. His discussion
of demography and agriculture in particular established a new agenda,
which increasingly is dominated by scientific approaches and data. This
basic orientation has now been much elaborated and extended.3 Paleo-
climatologists around the world are adding new and increasingly highly

2 Cf. the remarks by Harper (2015) 562.

3 For a sense of the rapid development of the field, see inter alia Harris (2013), Harper
(2017) and Scheidel (2018).
x INTRODUCTION

resolved data for many parts of the world so rapidly that it is very hard to
keep pace with the literature even within one subfield.
Three periods of climate history have received a good deal attention
in recent years: the so-called 4.2 ka (ca. 2200 BCE) event, the 3.2 ka
event (ca. 1100 BCE, the so-called Bronze Age Collapse) and the Roman
Climate Optimum, a period with inexact temporal boundaries but gener-
ally understood, for the central Mediterranean, as lying between 100 BCE
and 150 CE. Now there is work on shorter term climate shocks as well.
An important contribution to the debate now is the study of the impact of
explosive volcanic eruptions on hydroclimate, which in large part is due to
the increased chronological precision produced by ice core geochemistry
(Manning, Ludlow et al. 2017; Sigl et al. 2015).

Koenraad Verboven---Climate
and Society: A Complex Story
With few exceptions reliable direct meteorological measurements are
not available before the nineteenth century. Temperatures, rainfall or
prevailing wind directions and strengths have to be inferred from indirect
data. The past few decades climate scientists have collected an impres-
sive amount of such ‘proxy data’ from tree rings, ice-core layers, glaciers,
speleothems, stable isotope variations and many more ‘natural archives’.
There are many difficulties in the interpretation of these data as indi-
cators of relative and absolute meteorological data such as temperature
and precipitation values. But in this respect as well the methodolog-
ical advances during the past decades have been impressive. The datasets
continue to expand and are easily accessible for research. For historians,
however, the relevant questions are not what average temperatures were
and how they changed, or how much rain or snow there was. The relevant
question is how this affected human history.
Clearly climate is an important factor in historical developments.
Climate affects the ecosystems and thus also the socio-ecological systems
(SES) in which human societies develop. But this process is far from
straightforward. It is profoundly non-linear. More or less rain can result
in strains on food production methods, but populations can respond by
changing production and storage methods, or even diets. The effects
of climatic events and trends depend on human landscape manage-
ment. Agrarian use of slopes without precautions triggers erosion even
 INTRODUCTION xi

without changes in precipitation levels. Conversely increased rainfall can

be managed by sensible drainage systems.
Individual human actions have little impact, but the aggregate impact
of large numbers of individual actions can be extremely damaging or
protecting. Potentially even more impactful are cooperative efforts. Coop-
eration among humans, however, depends on prevailing institutions,
social structures and inequalities in power and wealth distributions.
Without understanding the social structure and dynamics of human popu-
lations, therefore, we cannot hope to understand the historical effects of
climate change.
Human societies are part of socio-ecological systems (SES) that are
both complex and adaptive. They consist of different components—not
only individuals and organized groups, but also animals, plants, pathogens
and even non-living elements as soils and landscape reliefs—interacting
and affecting each other, each responding differently to inputs. If we want
to understand the effects of climate changes at local/regional/global
scales we need to study these systems as a whole, including their societal
characteristics besides their ecological, geographic and climatic. Such a
holistic approach is not feasible for single researchers or monodisciplinary
teams. We need multidisciplinary teams including historians, social scien-
tists, archaeologists, geomorphologists and climate scientists. This book
is a step in this direction.
A key concept to understand the evolution of complex systems is
their resilience—their ability to absorb shocks but also, and more impor-
tantly, their ability to adapt and change without breaking down as a
system. According to resilience theory any SES will go through phases
of episodic change (Redman 2005). Typically these changes follow an
‘adaptive cycle’ consisting first of ‘exploitation’ followed by ‘conserva-
tion’. During the exploitation phase the system (e.g. a polis-based SES)
expands its potential and thus builds up its capital base. From a human
perspective, for instance, new land is brought under cultivation, wild-life
is controlled, forests felled or reorganized for human exploitation; mate-
rially, public infrastructure is built, production, storage, and distribution
facilities for consumables are constructed; socially, power distributions
are realigned and institutionalized; and so on. During the conservation
phase the system enjoys its newly acquired higher state; land is being
cultivated, the proceeds are distributed towards elites and non-elites ….
The progressive ‘exploitation’ and ‘conservation’ phases are followed
by a ‘release’ or ‘collapse’ phase during which the built-up capital—for
xii INTRODUCTION

instance the concentration of land, wealth, power and technical know-

how—is destroyed or rearranged—for instance through the destruction
of production facilities and large land holdings, the redistribution of agri-
cultural land or the destruction of oligarchic rule. The ‘release/collapse’
phase is eventually followed by a reorganization—for instance a transition
from direct exploitation to tenancy, or vice versa; from dispersed authority
(oligarchy, democracy) to centralized authority (monarchy), or vice versa,
from gift-exchange of status goods to market-based commodity exchange,
or vice versa.
Climate change is not an external variable in this process. An increase
or decrease in precipitation levels and temperatures may boost an exploita-
tion phase or trigger collapse. Yet while it is true that human agency
had very little impact on such climate phenomena before the indus-
trial era, human interventions have profoundly affected how climate
changes translated into impacts on ecosystems since many thousands of
years. As many contributions in this book show, agrarian-based ecosys-
tems with a predominance of human food crops generally respond very
differently to climate change than non-human determined ecosystems.
Historical studies of climate change, therefore, have to include the
interaction between societal systems and ecosystems as integral parts of
socio-ecological systems.
Historical trajectories of societal systems are far more complicated than
their ‘complexity’ in terms of systems theory can capture. The ‘com-
plex adaptive nature’ of societal systems means that they too consist
of interacting non-homogenous components—in plain speak individuals,
households, families and small or not so small groups—that have inde-
pendent agency from the higher system. The human dimension of social
behaviour imbues societal systems with a heterogeneity that is qualita-
tively different from that underlying ecosystems, climate or geophysical
systems.
Conceptually we can ascribe agency to animals, plants, even to things
and spaces; we can even, as in Actor Network Theory, situate agency in
relations rather than in individuals or collective entities. But conceptual
ascriptions to fit social-science models should not be confused with the
reality they are trying to model. Not every actant is an ‘agent endowed
with will and understanding’, having the ability to decide consciously or
 INTRODUCTION xiii

unconsciously to act or not.4 Only higher-order animals are effectively

endowed with agency in this sense. Among them, human beings are
incomparably more powerful because their collective agency is aided by
symbolic languages that support social learning and memories. Together
symbolic languages, social cognition and memories forge and express
social identities that merge individual and collective interests. These iden-
tities in turn stimulate cooperation and inform incentivized co-operators
on their expected roles. For the same reason, however, misunderstand-
ings, overestimations and even denial of external realities are built-in in
our mental system. We perceive reality—even experience it to a large
extent—through the lens of the symbolic languages we use to inform
ourselves and others, and we make sense of this perceived and expe-
rienced reality by inserting it in cognitive frames built through social
learning and memories. The current denial of climate change, COVID-
19 impacts, and the anti-vaxers movement are painful reminders of the
limits of our understandings. Human realities are phenomenological, not
ontological. Hence, the societal part of socio-ecological systems does not
abide by any comprehensive rule set governing the overarching SES.
Or more correctly in terms of systems theory: the rule sets governing
socio-ecological systems are predictive, not deterministic.
For instance, as Tim Soens (2018) argued for coastal communities in
early modern Flanders to understand societal change we cannot look only
at the systemic level to understand the supposed resilience or breakdown
of the system. We need to factor in the victims and victors, the losers
and winners. Major questions need to be asked such as whether and how
existing elites succeed or fail to take advantage of the impacts of (in our
case) environmental changes to improve their elite status by increasing
their wealth and/or power. ‘Resilience’ may be defined as the ability of
a societal system to maintain its features against external and internal
shocks. But the inevitable costs involved are rarely distributed evenly or
in proportion to the existing resource distributions. Resilience may be
achieved by upgrading and downgrading the living standards of large

4 Audi and Audi 2017: 17 s.v. ‘agent causation’; the terminology is muddled; ‘actant’,
‘actor’ and ‘agent’ are (too) often used as interchangeable concepts. I think this is regret-
table because the negation of the primary difference between material agents and human
agents obscures more than it reveals, but I cannot go into that discussion here; the liter-
ature on the agency of objects, particularly in anthropology, is vast; for an introduction
and discussion see Hoskins (2006).
xiv INTRODUCTION

swaths of the people in it, by destroying habitual ways of life, by shifting

them within the structural boundaries of the system—from freeholders
to peasants, to day-labourers; from shopkeepers to hired hands; from
merchants to land-owners; and so on… Unless we realize this and include
it in our research questionnaire, the definition of resilience covers up
dynamics that profoundly impact how societies change or not in response
to climate change.
In addition to societal subsystems, such as villages or clans, societies
comprise also ‘classes’, ‘status groups, ‘orders’, ‘races’ and other social
categories. These are useful conceptual labels because they express similar-
ities in individual or small-group behaviour that derive from the position
of people and groups within social structures. As such the labels denote
real-world phenomena, valid subjects of research in themselves, determi-
nants of a system’s overall behaviour and thus components of the system.
Yet they are not themselves subsystems. Although similarities may be iden-
tified in the behaviour of the agents belonging to a specific class, status
category or order, they do not per se interact more with their ‘likes’
than with agents belonging to different categories—servants, masters, co-
workers, bosses, soldiers, officers and so on. Members of the same class
may live in different, even distant, communities with little or no inter-
secting social networks to connect them. The labels denote components
of socio-cultural (sub)systems that cross through and interact with soci-
etal subsystems. In studying impacts of climate change, culture is part of
the equation as much as precipitation levels are.
Systemic behaviour is guided by rule sets (Verboven 2021). In complex
adaptive systems, however, different rule sets are at work. Obviously
natural laws drive climate change—cloud formations, winds, precipitation
and so on—but these are only a small part of the story of human climate
history. Social rules and institutions drive how humans impact ecosystems
and how they respond or fail to respond to climate change. Contrary to
the laws of physics, this drive is not deterministic. Natural laws deter-
mine natural events—how matter and energy change or not. Social rules
predict social events—how human beings act or not. These predictions
are never absolute. They depend on circumstances that are often unpre-
dictable. Shared social rules and institutions are road maps that allow
humans to navigate themselves and others towards and along values and
interests, and to predict how others will do the same. But social rules
only exist because they are played out by agents who have a choice—even
if it sometimes means suffering or death. This playing out of rules not
 INTRODUCTION xv

only depends on how well the agents understand the rules by which they
and others are expected to play. Agents can choose or feel constrained to
play out, ignore or break rules in specific situational contexts according to
the social roles in which they feel cast, but also according to the personal
or collective interests they perceive. They have memories that affect how
situations are interpreted, anticipations regarding the outcome of their
and other agents’ actions, and hopes and fears of future events—real or
imagined.
The structural position of agents within a system affects their behaviour
and the rule sets they choose to follow or deviate from. Partly this is
the case because the position in which a person—or a collective—situates
himself and others affects the social roles and expectations inherent in
that position (their gender or social or economic class for instance). Partly
also this is because resource endowments and flows are tied up with social
structures. Purposeful action may fail or be impossible not because people
fail to see what needs to be done, but because they lack the means to act
effectively.
What does all this mean for human climate history? It means that we
need to ask not just how the impact of climate change on ecosystems
might have affected the socio-ecological systems of past societies. We
need to ask how social structures, institutions, resource endowments and
culture were affected by and responded to climate change impacts and
we need to ask how they—driven by dynamics that cannot be reduced to
climate events—impacted both directly and indirectly (via their societal
systems) on ecosystems.

Paul Erdkamp---Climate and Society:

Studying Ancient Worlds
The impact of climate change on society is in part a question of temporal
scale. It has been pointed out that on the scale of the entire Holocene
(which started after the last Glacial Period about 11,700 years ago),
there seems to be no correlation between climate and society. The long-
term climatic trend over the Holocene up to twentieth century (when,
according to some, the Anthropocene began) was one of decreasing
temperature and humidity, as the climate in western Eurasia was colder
and drier at the end of the Holocene than in its first half. Despite
fluctuations and geographical variations this general long-term trend is
clear. However, population levels, societal complexity and life expectancy
xvi INTRODUCTION

increased significantly between those two points in time (Roberts et al.

2019, 15), again with much fluctuation and variation, but undeniably
so. In short, the long-term trend did not constrain the development
of humankind quantitatively or qualitatively. Nobody would want to
conclude that humans fare better in colder and drier conditions, so
the conclusion must be that societies were resilient. In the long run,
humankind did well, despite overall adverse climatic trends.
However, from a different perspective the image reverses, at least for
those historical eras and regions for which quantifiable data are available.
Some of the most severe mortality crises can be related to climatic events,
such as the extremely cold decade of the 1690s. Large segments of the
population in the most affected countries proved vulnerable to the effects
of prolonged periods of cold on livestock and arable farming, causing
hundreds of thousands to perish in Scotland and Finland (Huhtamaa
and Helama 2017, 9; D’Arrigo et al. 2020). Despite differing degrees
of vulnerability, societies clearly were susceptible to weather extremes that
caused harvest failures or floods. But also the demographic impact of these
years of extreme weather is a matter of scale, as Scotland’s and Finland’s
population recovered fairly soon. In the long run, the cold spell of the
1690s had little impact on northern Europe’s demography, although the
catastrophic experience may have seriously affected these societies in other
ways. Demographic studies of societies that offer sufficient empirical data
have shown that famines by themselves had little impact on population
levels in the long run. Long-term demographic trends are much more
determined by the presence and absence of epidemic disease, which makes
the debate on the possible links between climate change and epidemics a
hugely important one.
In order to establish the impact of climate change empirically, we need
time series of data on weather, population and economy, which are avail-
able for western Europe and China from the later Middle Ages onwards,
but for few societies beyond these temporal and spatial boundaries. Our
demographic or economic data for early societies are far less accurate
than those for early modern Europe and China, at best allowing the
identification of relative trends. Population estimates for ancient societies
are generally based on estimates of settlement size and number, while
those for prehistory are derived from trends in C14-datings (Bevan et al.
2018, 2019). The results are characterized by a low spatial and temporal
resolution and a wide margin of uncertainty.
 INTRODUCTION xvii

The difference in the nature of the sources for early and later societies
is linked to distinctions in methodologies and disciplines. The availability
of written historical data for early modern societies in Europe means that
the debate on the impact of climate in this period is mostly conducted
by historians, in contrast to the debate on the same issues regarding
ancient societies, in which archaeology plays a major role. Both disci-
plines have shown widely differing perspectives on the role of climate
in world history. However, also within the discipline of archaeology,
perspectives have been shifting in recent decades, as processual archae-
ology—at least in part—yielded to postprocessual archaeology. Processual
archaeology was characterized by the search for underlying principles
in human society—principles that were mostly found in environmental
factors (O’Brien 2017, 296; Weber 2017, 27). Fundamental drivers
of societal dynamics were seen in the link between environment and
population. Environmental change, population growth, carrying capacity
and societal collapse were therefore key themes in this approach to
the past. However, the emphasis on underlying principles and environ-
mental factors made processual archaeology vulnerable to environmentally
inclined ‘Grand Narratives’, a realization that stimulated the shift towards
postprocessual archaeology, which aims at a more balanced approach to
the interplay of environmental and societal factors.
This paradigm shift within archaeology also contributed to bridging
the gap between archaeologists and most historians, as the latter tend to
dismiss theories that perceive societies as passive subjects to environmental
factors. The reluctance of many historians to accept a determining role
of environmental factors in historical processes is often depicted as an
instinctive response to ideas that threaten their traditional belief in the
primacy of human agency. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, history as
an academic discipline held as one of its basic principles that all societies
were unique and had to be understood by themselves. The subjection
of historical processes to environmental determinants as a universal law
of history conflicted with the basic understanding of the drivers behind
societal developments. History as a discipline has changed significantly
since the nineteenth century, but it is still very much rooted in the same
soil. In a sense, over the course of the twentieth century, the historical
discipline moved in the direction of social science, often putting social and
economic factors at the heart of the narrative and assigning an important
role to the environment, including climate, but many historians are still
xviii INTRODUCTION

very much weary of universal truths in the past and of ‘Grand Narratives’
that reduce myriad events to a few big ideas.5
This volume brings together historians, archaeologists and paleoclima-
tologists who critically discuss the impact of climate change on ancient
societies, focusing on western Eurasia and starting with the Neolithic,
while ending at the early Middle Ages.
The first section consists of four thematic chapters, each dealing with
a different aspect of the debate. Reconstructions of past climates by pale-
oclimatologists constitute the starting point for the analysis of the impact
of climate change on early societies. An understanding of what the proxies
on which these reconstructions are based can tell us about past climates—
and what not—is fundamental to the debate. Hence, Paul Erdkamp starts
with an overview of the most relevant proxies with an eye to the temporal
and spatial resolution of these data, as this aspect is crucial regarding
the link that modern scholars draw between environmental and societal
processes. He also notes that the recent increase in the resolution of our
image of past climate change has triggered a veritable paradigm shift.
While the earlier data seemed to point to clear-cut centuries-long climatic
eras, recent analyses emphasize short-term fluctuations and regional vari-
ations within long-term trends and therefore move away from thinking in
terms of climatic epochs.
Frits Heinrich and Annette Hansen give a leading role to an element
that is central to the impact of climate on society, but that has curiously
received little attention in historic debates: agricultural crops. Many misin-
formed assumptions concerning the impact of changes in temperature and
precipitation have guided narratives of the impact of climate change on
society. Based on crop biology and agricultural science, the authors offer
a nuanced overview of the biochemical processes affected by changing
meteorological conditions. They moreover warn against easy and gener-
alized conclusions, as they emphasize the crucial importance of time scale
and of the vital but variable role of the human actor.

5 Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie hesitated to assign climate a determining role in human

history: ‘In short, the narrowness of the range of secular temperature variations, and the
autonomy of the human phenomena which coincide with them in time, make it impossible
for the present to claim that there is any causal link between them. […] I am satisfied if
this book establishes certain primary phenomena of pure climatic history. The secondary
question, of the impact of climate on human affairs, belongs to another province, and to
researches not yet carried out’ (Quote from p. 292.).
 INTRODUCTION xix

On the basis of his expertise in how longer-term water practices emerge

from short-term actions of human and non-human agents in historical
and archaeological periods, Maurits Ertsen discusses models on the inter-
action between humans and landscapes that have been applied in the
case of the Roman world. His conclusion emphasizes that our models of
larger-scale and longer-term correlations between environmental and soci-
etal processes must be based on our understanding of causalities between
short-term agencies.
The analysis of famines, demography and climate in Italy from the late
seventeenth to the early twentieth century by Paolo Malanima offers the
kind of study that prehistorians and ancient historians need to help them
interpret the limited data that they have for the societies they study. As we
have noted above, early societies lack quantifiable evidence concerning the
demographic impact of climate change on their populations. The combi-
nation of imprecise and uncertain data on demographic trends and the
general absence of climatic data on an annual, let alone seasonal or daily,
scale makes it impossible to empirically analyse the impact of weather
phenomena or climate change on mortality or fertility. Studies into the
demography of prehistory or antiquity inevitably rely on the models that
are based on the empirical data of later times. Malanima’s chapter shows
how complex the empirical study of the link between weather phenomena,
agricultural production and demographic shocks is.
The remainder of the volume presents case-studies that span the
Neolithic to the early medieval period and cover much of Europe,
the Near East and northern Africa. Caroline Heitz et al. on the one
hand discuss such concepts as resilience and collapse, on the other
methodological aspects of analysing prehistoric societal change from these
perspectives. They do so on the basis of long-term data series concerning
climate and settlement activities on the northern Alpine foreland. While
the impact of climate change on society is clear, the authors see this
not as collapse and population decline, but as an adaptive response by
highly mobile agrarian societies. Their ability to adapt to challenging
environmental situations was fundamental to these agrarian societies’
resilience.
Juan Carlos Moreno García challenges the textual and archaeological
basis of narratives that see the changes in the Egyptian kingdom at the end
of the third millennium BCE as a form of collapse resulting from adverse
climate change. He argues that there is no clear evidence of climatic
events causing the collapse of the Egyptian political system. Instead, he
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