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

Paul Erdkamp, Joseph Manning & Koenraad Verboven (eds.). (2021). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

The emphasis of this book is placed firmly on the necessity of a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of climate change in the ancient world, with input from archaeologists, climate scientist, geomorphologists as well as historians. Spanning from the Neolithic rise of complex societies to the beginnings of the early modern period (i.e., from roughly the fourth millennium BCE to the end of the first millennium CE), the book first introduces a range of methodologies for collecting data (e.g., isotope analysis, extracting ice cores, speleothems and sediment deposits) before moving onto a series of case studies from across the ancient Mediterranean and near East (for example in Egypt, Greece, Italy and Turkey). Throughout the focus is on the relationship between environment and society and how the climate ‘affects the ecosystems and thus also the socio-ecological systems (SES) in which human societies develop’ (p. x).

Example quotation

Our ability to integrate climate data with humanistic archives about past climate change is one of the most important and exciting developments 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.

(p. viii)