Table Of ContentPALGRAVE 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.Suchtheoreticalandcomparativeapproachestotheancient
economypromotestheincorporationoftheancientworldintostudiesof
economichistorymorebroadly,endingthetraditionofviewingantiquity
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
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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
generalclaimsfromoutsidethesedisciplines.Climatechangeoverthepast
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-
nousprocessesofpolitical,economicanddemographicdecline,arguethat
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.
Thisvolumefocusesonthelinkbetweenclimateandsocietyinancient
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,
earlyeconomiesmayappeartobemoresubjectedtoenvironmentalforces
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.
Theconnectionbetweenenvironmentandhumancultureswasalready
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,andthepowersofhisobservations.VonHumboldtlaidthefounda-
tionformuchoftheworknowbeingdoneinclimatesciencelaboratories
around the world. With an understanding of the interconnectedness of
theworld,‘Humboldtianscience’asitisnowcalled,historiansandscien-
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-
standingofhistoricalclimatechangecouldturntotheclassicaccountsby
the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and his pioneering
TimesofFeast,TimesofFamine.AHistoryofClimateSincetheYear1000
(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-
minedthetimingofgrapeharvestsinBurgundy.Withincreasingamounts
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
earlytwentiethcentury,historianstendedtofocusonpoliticalhistory,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
1Morerecentworkbyhimincorporatesmoreclimatedataanddepartsfromhisearlier
viewsoftheroleofclimatechangeinhistory.SeeLeRoyLadurie(2004),LeRoyLadurie
andVasak(2011).Fortheevolution ofLeRoy Ladurie’sthinking,seethe essaybyMike
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
humanhistoryliesbeforeus.Historywillneveragainbebasedonwritten
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
washot,agriculturewasaccomplishedbyirrigatingfieldsfromtheannual
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,
farmershadtodependonrain.Greekswerequarrelsomeandcompetitive,
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-
mentaryphrase‘climatedeterminism’,committedbyMontesquieuinthe
eighteenth, Friedrich Ratzel in Germany in the nineteenth and the Yale
geographerEllsworthHuntingtonintheearlytwentiethcentury.In1915
Huntington wrote an influential book entitled Civilization and Climate.
It was a compelling story, complete with observations of temperature,
humidityandhumanhealth,thatmappedhumancivilizationandclimatic
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.
Thecentralquestionis:wasclimaticchangethemostimportantdriver
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
somehowberelatedjustwon’tdo.Wethinkthattheintegrationofhistor-
icalandclimatedatewithinthismodelisaverygood(ifverychallenging)
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-
tiontoeconomichistoryasbankrobberstothehistoryofbanking’.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
tinypartofhistoricalchange,atothertimesitmighthaveplayedasignifi-
cantrole.Thechallengeistomeasure climateasanindependentvariable.2
Here time scale is critical, and we are fortunate now, compared to 1980,
inhavingmuchbetterandmorehighlyresolveddata,oftenwiththesame
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)andHughes(1996),canandmustnowbystudiedalong-
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
2Cf. the remarks by Harper (2015) 562.
3Forasenseoftherapiddevelopmentofthefield,seeinteraliaHarris(2013),Harper
(2017) and Scheidel (2018).
