Climate and causation in the Swedish Iron Age: learning from the present to understand the past

Abstract

The paper reassesses the role of climate as a factor shaping changes in settlement and landscape in the Swedish Iron Age (500 BC to AD 1050). Two reasons motivate this re-evaluation. First, high-resolution data based on climate proxies from the natural sciences are now increasingly available. Second, the climate-related social sciences have yielded conceptual and theoretical developments regarding vulnerability and adaptability in the present and recent past, creating new ways to analyse the effects of climatic versus societal factors on societies in the more distant past. Recent research in this field is evaluated and the explicitly climate deterministic standpoint of many recent natural science texts is criticized. Learning from recent approaches to climate change in the social sciences is crucial for understanding society-climate relationships in the past. The paper concludes that we are not yet in a position to fully evaluate the role of the new evidence of abrupt climate change in 850 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Regarding the crisis in the mid first millennium AD, however, new climate data indicate that a dust veil in AD 536-537 might have aggravated the economic and societal crisis known from previous research.

The Agrarian Life of the North 2000 BC–AD 1000

“…It seems that several factors were working together and that the outcome varied locally (Widgren 2012), but climate disasters and plague epidemics may still have been precipitating causes. The seed of this lies far back in time, but seems to be connected to the warrior aristocracy no longer being able to maintain its power base in many areas.…”

“…The idea is therefore that changes can be traced to social rivalry such as was known in the Roman Period, but that it takes many years before this causes permanent changes, perhaps triggered by crises or crop failure, eventually leading to a loss of ceramics as one of several outcomes. This is also a chain of events paralleled in adaptations to disasters seen in modern-day cultural geographical/ anthropological studies (Widgren 2012).…”

“…A significant upsurge in the deposition of gold hoards coincides with the changes in the burial deposits (Bøe 1923;Stenberger 1979: 493 Axboe 1999) and a number of farms and fields of arable land are abandoned (Welinder 1975;Rønneseth 1981;Pedersen 1999: 50;Widgren 2012). This abandonment can be seen in connection with the restructuring of agriculture and changes in property rights in which land was gradually united into larger estates Iversen 1999;Myhre 2002: 191;Ljungkvist 2006; but see also for European examples).…”

Origin and Development of Managed Meadows in Sweden: A Review

“…In Sweden, cadastral maps made between the 17thto the middle 19th-centuries show that meadows often dominated the infield areas (Swedish: inägor). Infields (Widgren, 2012a;Berglund et al, 2014, Eriksson andArnell, 2017) here refer to the enclosed land surrounding settlements, where herbivory from wild herbivores and livestock was prevented (or, for livestock, kept under strict control). It has been estimated that meadows covered from 25-40% of the infield area in agricultural plains in southern Sweden (e.g.…”

Historical and Current Niche Construction in an Anthropogenic Biome: Old Cultural Landscapes in Southern Scandinavia

“…Over time, these forests developed into mixed semi-open woodlands. Although the causation behind the infield system is complex [28,38], the most reasonable rationale was the need for keeping the essential livestock over the cold winters. Broadly speaking and despite periods of reorganization of land ownership and tenure, this management system was maintained until the modernization of agriculture, which took place between the mid-19th century (in the most productive agricultural areas) and the early 20th century.…”