Journal ArticleDOI
Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean
TLDR
The authors reviewed the current state of the archaeological and historical evidence and considered the coherence of climatic explanations and overprecise chronologies in attempting to place the "crisis" in context.Abstract:
Explanations for the Late Bronze Age crisis and collapse in the eastern Mediterranean are legion: migrations, predations by external forces, political struggles within dominant polities or system collapse among them, inequalities between centers and peripheries, climatic change and natural disasters, disease/plague. There has never been any overarching explanation to account for all the changes within and beyond the eastern Mediterranean, some of which occurred at different times from the mid to late 13th throughout the 12th centuries B.C.E. The ambiguity of the evidence—material, textual, climatic, chronological—and the differing contexts involved across the central-eastern Mediterranean make it difficult to disentangle background noise from boundary conditions and to distinguish cause from effect. Can we identify the protagonists of the crisis and related events? How useful are recent explanations that focus on climate and/or chronology in providing a better understanding of the crisis? This article reviews the current state of the archaeological and historical evidence and considers the coherence of climatic explanations and overprecise chronologies in attempting to place the “crisis” in context. There is no final solution: the human-induced Late Bronze Age “collapse” presents multiple material, social, and cultural realities that demand continuing, and collaborative, archaeological, historical, and scientific attention and interpretation. This article is available as open access on (AJA Online).read more
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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
TL;DR: The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Climate change: The 2015 Paris Agreement thresholds and Mediterranean basin ecosystems
Joël Guiot,Wolfgang Cramer +1 more
TL;DR: In the Mediterranean basin, recent pollen-based reconstructions of climate and ecosystem variability over the past 10,000 years provide insights regarding the implications of warming thresholds for biodiversity and land-use potential and scenarios of climate-driven future change in land ecosystems are compared.
Journal ArticleDOI
History meets palaeoscience: Consilience and collaboration in studying past societal responses to environmental change.
John Haldon,Lee Mordechai,Timothy P. Newfield,Arlen F. Chase,Adam Izdebski,Piotr Guzowski,Inga Labuhn,Neil Roberts +7 more
TL;DR: Several ways in which a consilience between the historical sciences and the natural sciences, including attention to even distant historical pasts, can deepen contemporary understanding of environmental change and its effects on human societies are suggested.
Journal ArticleDOI
Late Bronze Age climate change and the destruction of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor at Pylos
Martin Finné,Karin Holmgren,Chuan-Chou Shen,Hsun-Ming Hu,Meighan Boyd,Meighan Boyd,Sharon R. Stocker +6 more
TL;DR: The δ18O record shows generally wetter conditions at the time when the Palace of Nestor at Pylos was destroyed, but a brief period of drier conditions around 3200 yrs BP may have disrupted the Mycenaean agricultural system that at thetime was likely operating close to its limit.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean From the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World
TL;DR: The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean From the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World by Cyprian Broodbank as discussed by the authors is an excellent book for Mediterranean history.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Absolute age range of the Late Cypriot IIC Period on Cyprus
Sturt W. Manning,Bernhard Weninger,Alison K. South,Barbara Kling,Peter Ian Kuniholm,James D. Muhly,Soophocles Hadjisavvas,David A. Sewell,Gerald Cadogan +8 more
TL;DR: An absolute date range for the main Late Cypriot IIC period on Cyprus, from c. 1340-1315 BC to c. 1200 BC, is proposed in this article.
Journal ArticleDOI
Seasonality variations in the Central Mediterranean during climate change events in the Late Holocene
Marie-Louise Sophie Goudeau,Gert-Jan Reichart,Johannes C. Wit,L. J. de Nooijer,Anna-Lena Grauel,Anna-Lena Grauel,Stefano M. Bernasconi,G. J. de Lange +7 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify events of high and low-detrital input to the Gulf of Taranto (Central Mediterranean Sea), anticipated to be linked to humid and dry conditions, respectively and, thereby, potentially reflecting seasonal contrasts.