Land use patterns and climate change—a modeled scenario of the Late Bronze Age in Southern Greece

Abstract

In this study, we present a modeling approach that investigates how much cultivable land was required to supply a society and whether societies were in need when environmental conditions deteriorated. The approach is implemented for the North-Eastern Peloponnese and is based upon the location of Late Helladic IIIB (1300-1200 BCE) archaeological sites, an assessment of their sizes, and a proposed diet of the people. Based on these information, the areal requirement of each site is calculated and mapped. The results show that large sites do not have sufficient space in their surroundings in order to supply themselves with the required food resources and thus they depended on supplies from the hinterland. Dry climatic conditions aggravate the situation. This indicates that potential societal crisis are less a factor of changing environmental conditions or a shortage of arable land but primarily caused by socio-economic factors.

Reconstruction of palaeoenvironmental variability based on an inter-comparison of four lacustrine archives on the Peloponnese (Greece) for the last 5000 years

“…For Pheneos, PC1 also spans the axis between carbonate and terrigenous assemblages (53.1 %), but Sr appears more distant from Ca and closer to Si, indicating an additional non-carbonaceous Sr source, e.g. feldspars (Kylander et al, 2011). Generally, the loadings of Ca and Sr in carbonates are closely bound together and point to one axis direction, while the loadings of elements such as Al, Fe, K, Rb, Si, Ti, and Zr in clastic material show a wider spread of directions, but largely point to the opposite direction of the carbonates, indicating a high negative correlation (Fig.…”

“…4000 cal BP can be linked to climatic rather than anthropogenic forcing, which was locally restricted. The possible impacts of climatic changes on sedentary communities are a key topic in palaeoclimatic research in the eastern Mediterranean; they may have been one factor contributing to the downturn of societies, as intensely discussed for the Late Helladic Mycenaean palatial period (Drake, 2012;Finné et al, 2017;Kaniewski et al, 2013;Knapp and Manning, 2016;Knitter et al, 2019; for cultural phases see Table S3).…”

Modeling multivariate landscape affordances and functional ecosystem connectivity in landscape archeology

“…However, there are different modeling techniques to combine multivariate environmental data and archeological datasets. Fuzzy categories, for example, create data ranges that dissolve breaks and thresholds in landscape and archeological classifications (Knitter et al, 2019;Popa and Knitter, 2016). The method offers tendencies (e.g.…”

How Much Is Enough? First Steps to a Social Ecology of the Pergamon Microregion

“…On the contrary, a place can be slightly, moderately, or highly suitable for certain practices. To take this fact into account, we employ fuzzy logic theory ( [57]; for details on the method, see [58] or [59]; for applications in landscape archaeology, see [60][61][62], or [63]). To think of a dataset in fuzzy terms means to translate its crisp numerical characteristics into degrees of belonging.…”