Last week the Los Angeles Times had an interesting article on new scientific research that claims to have demonstrated that climate changed caused the widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE. According to research done by David Kaniewski et al. on pollen samples recovered from Cyprus, a massive drought hit at just the time when the Bronze Age cultures are known to have collapsed. Ancient writings have described crop failures, famines and invasions about the same time, suggesting that the drying trend triggered a chain of events that led to widespread societal collapse of these Late Bronze Age civilizations. This is particularly interesting to me since the late Bronze Age is one of my favorite periods, especially the survival of memories of it in later mythology. The Times was reporting on an article published in the Public Library of Science’s PLoS One journal. In it, the authors report the results of their findings, which suggest that climate change between the thirteenth and ninth centuries BCE resulted in widespread destabilization, leading to the collapse of the Hittites, Mycenaeans, and other cultures. The period of climate crisis is roughly equal to the period known as the Greek Dark Age, and the climate apparently began returning to more prosperous and wetter conditions during the Greek Geometric and Orientalizing periods, when trade with the Near East resumed. According to this analysis, the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the ancients considered responsible for much of the late Bronze Age crisis, were an ethnic group driven by a climate crisis into the eastern Mediterranean in search of resources. Who the Sea Peoples were is unknown. Scholars have also proposed that the Sea Peoples were Mycenaeans fleeing the collapse of Mycenaean power in Greece, or Minoans fleeing the same in Crete. Several other hypotheses have also been proposed, including an identification with the Philistines (who are also sometimes identified as early Greek migrants) or the Hittites. In fact, the Hittite hypothesis rests on early climate work that had suggested decades ago that droughts had caused famines around the time of the Sea Peoples’ invasion. By combining data from coastal Cyprus and coastal Syria, this study shows that the LBA [Late Bronze Age] crisis coincided with the onset of a ca. 300-year drought event 3200 years ago. This climate shift caused crop failures, dearth and famine, which precipitated or hastened socio-economic crises and forced regional human migrations at the end of the LBA in the Eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia. The Times interviewed archaeologist Lee Drake, who was not one of the study’s authors, but who went beyond the cautious conclusions of the article to essentially blame climate for the Bronze Age collapse single-handed: “We tend to focus on political, human-driven problems, but there isn’t a human driver for the destruction that matches what happened 3,000 years ago.”
I think that overstates things a bit. Right now, due to the current climate change situation, climate change has become a catch-all explanation for civilizational collapse, just as inter-ethnic warfare was a hot topic during the Civil Rights era. The most famous example of climate change destroying civilization—the Maya collapse—has now received criticism from scholars who have found human hands at work in the Maya collapse, particularly in the Maya’s unsustainable agriculture. In other words, climate did not cause the collapse by itself but rather worked in conjunction with human-made systems that were unable to adapt to changing conditions, creating instability, promoting warfare, and leading to collapse. I wonder if that’s not the case in the Bronze Age Mediterranean as well, as Kaniewski et al. suggest. The collapse occurred because the drought hit at a time when the region had become dependent on marginal agriculture (especially in mainland Greece) and international trade. Disrupting, for example, Mycenaean crops could lead to widespread systemic changes and collapse—but only because the human systems involved were rigid, authoritarian, and dependent on the status quo. Climate has changed more than once, and each change does not lead to collapse. I think it requires multiple components, including human factors, to cause widespread systemic failure. The Mycenaeans and he Hittites did not burn their rulers’ palaces and temples or abandon half the old gods just because of climate but rather because the elites failed in some way to address the changes and restore prosperity. Climate change exacerbated the tensions between the elite and peasantry, but it required a rigid and hierarchical system for that to occur. In other words, multiple factors result in historical events, and we can’t pin everything on just one cause, be it climate change or alien death rays.
32 Comments
bear47
8/19/2013 11:59:12 am
Jason,
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Thane
8/19/2013 12:40:57 pm
@bear47 Are you referring to the Santorini explosion, which I believe was in the bronze age but don't recall when within that time.
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The Other J.
8/20/2013 07:45:23 am
I was wondering the same thing about Santorini. That supervolcano blew around 1600 BCE, about 3500 years ago. So it's in the neighborhood and may have accelerated certain events, but hard to say. I'll leave it up to the site's resident experts to weigh in.
Alix
8/20/2013 11:22:14 am
The Other J. - That's a 400 year gap, though, between Santorini and the Catastrophe. It undoubtedly had effects on the region, major ones, and some of those would've rippled down, but it seems like a heck of a stretch to give that any significant role.
The Other J.
8/20/2013 01:16:34 pm
Alix -
Alix
8/20/2013 03:04:11 pm
The Other J. - Agreed. Also, it might've had other effects - possibly some environmental ones, affecting which cities are in ascendance, messing with trade routes (maybe). 8/19/2013 12:51:07 pm
I concur that the social structure in the Eastern Mediterranean was at least as important an influence on the nature of the LBA collapse as climate. I have commented on this paper here:
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8/19/2013 01:09:14 pm
Thanks for the links! It's nice to get a chance to talk about something that involves actual science and real learning for a change.
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Alix
8/20/2013 11:30:38 am
Nice posts.
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8/23/2013 11:23:20 am
@Alix
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Alix
8/23/2013 11:51:22 am
At least a handful of people have pointed out that the sites destroyed - and the sites folks relocated to or built up during this time - suggest that "Sea Peoples" may be something of a misnomer. What you say about the fall of Hatti plays into this - if one lumps that in as part of the Catastrophe, which I think it had to be related to somehow, one gets a different view of the movement of these mysterious marauders than if one excludes them. Also, it's not like other cities are always easy to include or exclude - I know that Carchemish is another debatable one. 8/23/2013 01:19:43 pm
@Alix
Alix
8/23/2013 01:35:08 pm
Yeah, some of his stuff is pretty weak or wrong. He has some decent points, but also some serious flaws. 8/23/2013 01:33:40 pm
"What you say about the fall of Hatti plays into this - if one lumps that in as part of the Catastrophe, which I think it had to be related to somehow, one gets a different view of the movement of these mysterious marauders than if one excludes them."
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Alix
8/23/2013 01:44:43 pm
Argh, I am really not being terribly coherent today, sorry. 8/23/2013 03:21:36 pm
@Alix
Alix
8/23/2013 03:41:41 pm
2. That's the text I was thinking of! Thank you.
Alix
8/23/2013 03:44:43 pm
Also, I meant to say, thanks for the link to that Google Earth data. That's really useful and interesting.
Cathleen Anderson
8/19/2013 12:57:56 pm
The title should be "Caused" not cause. That was the only error I noticed.
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8/19/2013 01:06:12 pm
I fixed it. I was rushing today because I had a massive work assignment come in, and apparently I was thinking faster than I typed again.
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Alix
8/20/2013 05:37:13 am
This is one of my all-time favorite topics, too. Thanks for pointing us to that article.
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The Other J.
8/20/2013 08:01:54 am
That's really interesting how conclusions about the distant past become a kind of Rorschach test for larger contemporary issues (inter-ethnic warfare, climate change). Is that more or less an accepted state of affairs in archaeology, or are there any studies exploring that angle?
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Alix
8/20/2013 11:18:25 am
Ooh, studies of ancient history as Rorshach tests would be awesome.
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Varika
8/21/2013 05:34:00 am
The Other J., from what I've seen--and admittedly I'm an armchair scientist in general--that's not only an accepted state of affairs in archeology, but also In most other sciences. Evidence is still required, but the latest theories often seem to march along with what's foremost in the minds of modern consciousness. On the other hand, I don't think that's something new and different, or something inexplicable. People seem to tend to look at things from whatever is the "popular" angle for a while and see what they can find. And usually, they find something, even if maybe later they find that it wasn't as big a deal as they first hyped it up to be--probably because it's really, REALLY rare for anything in life to have an actual single, isolated cause.
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Alix
8/21/2013 06:10:02 am
<I>it's really, REALLY rare for anything in life to have an actual single, isolated cause.</I>
Alix
8/21/2013 06:10:55 am
Gah! Apologies for the effed-up formatting.
The Other J.
8/21/2013 09:41:26 am
So being an accepted state of affairs, I'm guessing it's rare for someone to preface their work by acknowledging that it's being shaped by a socially-determined framework -- "We're looking at climate change for the collapse of the Mayan civilization BECAUSE climate change is really important to us right now and is in the news a lot." In academia you usually just get warrants for internal arguments; you don't often get the warrants for why an angle of study was taken in the first place. 8/21/2013 09:44:28 am
I imagine it's more of a zeitgeist thing than an actual conscious decision to apply modern concerns to the past. Often, these can only be seen in retrospect. The Victorians were very big on imperial rivalries as an explanation for history, and they had plenty of those in their age, but so "natural' did empire seem at the time that most didn't give a thought to whether they were projecting their own hopes and fears onto the past since it was just a self-evident truth. 8/25/2013 07:13:40 am
The "collapse" of any civilization is very complex, the reasons difficult to pin down, especially at such a distance in time. We are in the midst of our own civilzational collapse, and seem equally unable to stop it as we are to define its causes, though every ideology has its own sole precipitator, its personal bugaboo. Scientists and scholars who should be above such things often succumb to the movement of the moment, taking the easy path, looking into the past and seeing a mirror rather than facts appropriate to time and place.
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Great read, I have come to the same conclusion. I believe the event that caused the climactic change was Thera.
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E. Harding
11/16/2014 05:39:50 am
Wrong time period. We're talking about 400 years later.
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11/29/2015 04:45:56 pm
Fascinating insights, I hope you don't mind that I have linked to this from my blog!
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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