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Climate, Landscape, Settlement and Society: Exploring Human-Environment Interaction in the Ancient Near East

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CLaSS (Climate, Landscape, Settlement and Society: Exploring Human-Environment Interaction in the Ancient Near East)

Berichtszeitraum: 2023-07-01 bis 2024-06-30

The CLaSS project investigated the relationship between climate fluctuations and the emergence of complex social and political formations over the last 8000 years. The focus was on the area known as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. Over the course of the study period, this area saw the emergence of cities, states and empires. Climate fluctuations are generally considered to be a significant factor in these changes because in pre-industrial societies they directly relate to food production and security. In the short term, ‘collapse’ events brought about by extreme weather changes such as droughts have been blamed for declines in population, social complexity and political systems.

Studies seeking to correlate social and climatic changes in the past tend to focus on highly localised analyses of specific sites and surveys or take a more synthetic overview at much larger, even continental, scales. The CLaSS project took a ground breaking hybrid approach using archaeological data science (or ‘big data’) to construct detailed, empirical datasets at unprecedented scales. Archaeological settlement data, archaeobotanical data (plant and tree remains) and zooarchaeological (animal bones) data were collated for the entire Fertile Crescent and combined with climate simulations derived from General Circulation Models. The resulting datasets represent the largest of their kind ever compiled.

Collecting data at this scale allowed us to compare population densities and distribution, subsistence practices and landscape management strategies to investigate the question: What factors have allowed for the differential persistence of societies in the face of changing climatic and environmental conditions? Answering this question can help us to understand what made past communities resilient to climate change, which may have lessons for today. Over the course of the project, team members investigated how factors such as land use and productivity, inequality, and the exploitation of different crops and fuels, impacted past societies. We were able to show that there were several different routes to sustainability and resilience in the past. The long time depth of complex societies in the Fertile Crescent, as well as the abundance of archaeological and textual data, make it an ideal region in which to study these pathways.
Over the course of the project we designed and populated a database for the archaeological settlement data, which now contains about 70,000 sites and is being used by scholars around the world. We also produced a second population proxy dataset of over 11,000 radiocarbon dates. Comparing these two datasets means we can get a better grasp of past population fluctuations.

We have examined the collapse of societies due to the Rapid Climate Change phase known as the 4.2kya event. This was a period of drought around 4,200 years ago, which some have argued resulted in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire, as well as urban abandonment and population decline. We used our settlement and radiocarbon dataset to see if this was really the case, and looked at the periods before and afterwards to try to make sense of the ‘collapse’. We showed that the real anomaly was not the collapse, but the period of unprecedented urban growth which preceded these declines. We used our climate simulations to look at the 4.2kya event in more detail (Cookson et al. 2019) and show that the event may not have had as significant an impact as some have claimed. We also produced an open access set of rainfall data for the region across the whole Holocene.

On the long term, we investigated the relationship between climate and population changes across the last 10,000 years. For the first half of the Holocene dryer periods cause population decline. This is what we would expect in a relatively arid environment. However, during the second half of the Holocene this relationship gets much weaker, and population is decoupled from climate fluctuations. This coincides with the emergence of more complex social organisations, including cities, states and empires. More complex societies have a different relationship with climate – they are better able to ride out periods of aridity.

We showed that the decoupling outlined above does not correlate with major changes in the types or proportions of plants and animals that past communities were eating. This suggests the resilience we see in the past was not due to changes in what was being eaten, but rather in how food was produced and distributed. Urban sites were reliant on rural sites for some animal products. It seems that one of the ways in which resilience was achieved was through larger and more integrated organisational systems. Our recent research has also looked at fuel use. During periods of high population and urbanisation we found good evidence for the use of dung as fuel, which may indicate the exhaustion of local wood supplies.

In the last phase of the project we began to tie all of this together to understand how population, subsistence strategies and social organisation affected land use and sustainability. This included publishing the first ever comprehensive land use map for Southwest Asia, and investigating how land use impacts the longevity of urban formations and subsistence practices. We have teamed up with other projects to look at the role of inequality and warfare in relation to climate. These new collaborations demonstrate the legacy of CLaSS - the datasets collected will be of use to both the project team and the wider discipline for decades to come, helping us to answer questions which we may not even have thought of yet!
There are three major areas of novelty in the methodology of our project. These are the scale of the datasets collected, both in space and across time, the integration of archaeological data with climate modelling, and the use of innovative new proxies to understand sustainability and resilience using archaeological datasets. The information we now have in our databases comprises some of the largest collections anywhere in the world. Although the project is now completed, we will continue adding to these datasets. Most of our data is already available open access via the EU-funded Zenodo repository, and we plan to make everything available in the next year.

The project has pushed beyond the state of the art by providing a novel, nuanced and empirically rich understanding of how humans related to climate change over the Holocene in Southwest Asia. The CLaSS approach is now being copied in other areas of the world, including the Mediterranean. We have shown that while climate induced collapse was possible in some cases, it was never uniform or total - communities were able to survive and even flourish through adaptation. We have also shown that as societies grew more complex they were generally better at managing climate fluctuations. Organising and managing agriculture and production at larger scales enhanced sustainability, but also produced inequality and hierarchy. Interventions in the landscape, such as irrigation, are also associated with declines in sustainability of individual settlements but stabilised overall population levels. Investigating how these trade-offs worked can generate insights for modern climate planning.
Euphrates River in Southern Iraq, with date palms in the background
Map of the study area
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