Archaeological evidence and non-evidence for climatic change

1990 ◽  
Vol 330 (1615) ◽  
pp. 645-655 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climatic Change ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Climatic Effect ◽  
Climatic Effects ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Degree Of Confidence ◽  
Effect Relation ◽  
Climatic Event ◽  
Aegean Archaeology

‘Climate' is often used by historians to explain phenomena for which they cannot otherwise account. Accordingly, much of what has been written about climatic effects and climatic change must be read with extreme scepticism. Even though a disturbance may be obvious in the archaeological record, and it may be synchronous with a climatic event, a cause and effect relation should be demonstrated before one can say with any degree of confidence that the evidence is secure. Only when a number of separate lines of investigation agree on the same thing are we safe in positing true climatic ‘effect’ or ‘change’. This paper focuses on several instances in Mediterranean and Aegean archaeology where more or less satisfactory evidence for climatic change may be sought among a number of disciplines.

scholarly journals Holocene vegetation record of upland northern Calabria, Italy: Environmental change and human impact

The Holocene ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Sevink ◽  
Corrie C Bakels ◽  
Peter AJ Attema ◽  
Mauro A Di Vito ◽  
Ilenia Arienzo
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Forest Decline ◽  
Human Impacts ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Pollen Data ◽  
Plant Remains ◽  
Middle Bronze Age ◽  
Climatic Event ◽  
Mobile Pastoralism

Earlier studies on Holocene fills of upland lakes (Lago Forano and Fontana Manca) in northern Calabria, Italy, showed that these hold important palaeoecological archives, which however remained poorly dated. Their time frame is improved by new 14C dates on plant remains from new cores. Existing pollen data are reinterpreted, using this new time frame. Two early forest decline phases are distinguished. The earliest is linked to the 4.2 kyr BP climatic event, when climate became distinctly drier, other than at Lago Trifoglietti on the wetter Tyrrhenian side, where this event is less prominent. The second is attributed to human impacts and is linked to middle-Bronze Age mobile pastoralism. At Fontana Manca (c. 1000 m a.s.l.), it started around 1700 BC, in the higher uplands a few centuries later (Lago Forano, c. 1500 m a.s.l.). In the Fontana Manca fill, a thin tephra layer occurs, which appears to result from the AP2 event (Vesuvius, c. 1700 BC). A third, major degradation phase dates from the Roman period. Land use and its impacts, as inferred from the regional archaeological record for the Raganello catchment, are confronted with the impacts deduced from the palaeoarchives.

Slaves without Shackles: An Archaeology of Everyday Life on Gorée Island, Senegal

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ibrahima Thiaw
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Settlement Pattern ◽  
Heterogeneous Population ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Urban Settlement ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Transnational Community ◽  
Changing Patterns

This chapter examines how slavery was imprinted on material culture and settlement at Gorée Island. It evaluates the changing patterns of settlement, access to materials, and emerging novel tastes to gain insights into everyday life and cultural interactions on the island. By the eighteenth century, Gorée grew rapidly as an urban settlement with a heterogeneous population including free and enslaved Africans as well as different European identities. Interaction between these different identities was punctuated with intense negotiations resulting in the emergence of a truly transnational community. While these significant changes were noted in the settlement pattern and material culture recovered, the issue of slavery — critical to most oral and documentary narratives about the island — remains relatively opaque in the archaeological record. Despite this, the chapter attempts to tease out from available documentary and archaeological evidence some illumination on interaction between the different communities on the island, including indigenous slaves.

Martyria

2019 ◽  
pp. 88-104
Author(s):  
David L. Eastman
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Practices

Martyria served as spatial focal points for numerous practices associated with the early Christian cult of the saints. However, the archaeological study of these martyr shrines is limited by the lack of evidence prior to the fourth century, forcing scholars in many cases to rely on textual evidence for their reconstructions of spaces. This chapter studies the earliest evidence for martyr shrines in Smyrna and Rome, which is textual, in order to establish primitive Christian practices surrounding martyria. It then examines the archaeological evidence from martyria in Rome and Philippi of the fourth century or later. These sites demonstrate the continuing expansion of martyria as cultic centers. The chapter concludes with a caveat concerning the popularity of small, even private, shrines that are invisible to the archaeological record.

The Archaeological Record of Indian Ocean Engagements

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Far East ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Neutral Model ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Exchange Networks ◽  
The Far East

With the Bay of Bengal littoral as its focus, this chapter reviews the archaeological evidence for human expansions, migrations, formation of exchange networks, long-distance trade, political impulses, and transmissions of technocultural traditions in deep time, from around 5000 bc to 500 ad. In doing so, the author offers the idea of the Bay of Bengal Interaction Sphere, a “neutral” model of analysis that sets aside the constraints of the old Indianization debate for South-Southeast Asian interaction and situates the Bay within a broader global framework extending from the Mediterranean to the Far East in a new narrative of contact and change.

Centralized Storage in Later Prehistoric Britain

1983 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Gent
Keyword(s):  
Climatic Change ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Stored Grain ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Site Catchment ◽  
Storage Facilities

Archaeological evidence for centralized storage facilities may provide useful information about the organization of prehistoric economies. In the background are a range of explanatory ideas. ‘Redistribution’ is a term which has been applied to the evidence from some British hillforts. Resources might be collected and then re-allocated through a permanent agency of co-ordination. They might be mobilized as tribute to elites as part of political strategy. This has been suggested for early British hillforts, and the evidence is reviewed. Much depends on the interpretation of the ‘four-poster’ structures at these sites as storehouses. A survey of these structures on British and continental sites strengthens this interpretation, and a further survey shows that, in Britain, disproportionate numbers of these structures are found at massively enclosed sites. A modified form of site catchment analysis suggests that some of the hillforts stored produce mobilized from an area which was greater than is likely to have been farmed directly from these sites. One possible inference is that resources were mobilized from subordinate settlements. It is suggested that stored grain was a critical commodity if rising populations and climatic change combined to increase the risk attached to the cereal harvest.

Man-induced Environmental Factors in Relation to Fertility Changes in Pinnipeds

1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J.H. Reijnders
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Reproductive Performance ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Reproductive Failure ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Physiological Processes ◽  
Effect Relation ◽  
Reproductive Rates

The possible effects of human activities (such as the release of pollutants, exploitation, and disturbance) on the reproductive performance of pinniped populations (especially of certain seals) are discussed. While there are documented cases of reproductive rates increasing in exploited seal populations, the effects of disturbance on reproduction have only been suggested on the basis of rather incidental observations.In a number of cases the decline of a pinniped population has coincided with an elevation in the level of various contaminants. In some animals, reproductive failure has been associated with high levels of contaminants in their tissues; but even in these cases, no cause-and effect relation between pollutants and altered physiological processes has been established. Clearly, far more research will be needed to elucidate these problems.

scholarly journals The Appropriation of Death In Classical Athens

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alexandra Donnison
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Burial Practice ◽  
Funeral Practice ◽  
Grave Markers ◽  
Ideological Change

<p>This thesis is about the change in Athenian burial practices between the Archaic and Classical periods (500-430 B.C.E.), within the oikos and the polis. I argue that during this period there was a change in both burial practice and ideology. I hypothesise that the Homeric conception of death was appropriated by the state leading to a temporary ideological change in Athens between 500-430 B.C.E., with the result that the aristocratic Athenian oikoi exhibited a trend of anti-display. There then followed another shift in ideology, whereby the Athenian aristocrats reappropriated death, taking state funerary symbols and applying them to private death, which then resulted in the re-emergence of lavish yet iconographically different grave monuments. This is a study of varied and disparate sources ranging from archaeological evidence to later literature. It is divided into three parts. Chapter One outlines exactly what the changes in funeral practice were between the Archaic and Classical periods. It focuses on the decline of grave markers, the shift to extramural burial, the change in how funerals and death were depicted, the increased emphasis on state burial and the change in both public and private mourning practices around 480 B.C.E. I argue that there was a definite change in how the Athenians interacted with their dead, both physically and ideologically. Chapter Two examines the reasons behind the change in burial practices around 480 B.C.E. I argue that it is improbable such a complex change had simple factors or motivations behind it but rather that the most likely cause of such a shift in attitude was a combination of complex reasons, where a few predominate, such as appropriation of death by the polis resulting in glorified state burials and development of democracy. Chapter Three examines the re-emergence of grave monuments. The archaeological record reveals a reappearance of stone funerary sculpture a decade or so after the middle of the fifth century (c. 440-430 B.C.E.). I argue that the re-emergence of funeral sculpture was influenced heavily by foreign workers who brought with them their own burial practices which in turn inspired Athenian aristocrats to re-appropriate death and begin erecting private funeral monuments, however instead of only using Homeric imagery, as they had in earlier periods, they appropriated state symbols and incorporated them into private monuments.</p>

scholarly journals Canibalismo en el PleistocenoCannibalism during the Pleistocene

2016 ◽  
pp. 27
Author(s):  
J. Carlos Díez Fernández-Lomana ◽  
Antonio J. Romero
Keyword(s):  
Economic System ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Cultural Complexity ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Tool Marks ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Los Grupos ◽  
Made In

RESUMEN El consumo de miembros de la misma especie acontece en numerosos organismos y debió ser practicado por los humanos durante la Prehistoria, aunque su reconocimiento arqueológico es difícil. En muchas ocasiones podemos demostrar la intervención sobre los cuerpos, pero no si hubo ingesta de la carne. Tampoco es sencillo saber las causas concretas de cada acción de canibalismo, debido a que las evidencias halladas suelen ser magras y pueden interpretarse bajo diferentes hipótesis (equifinalidad). Hemos avanzado mucho en la caracterización de las señales dejadas por el empleo de armas y cuchillos sobre los cuerpos, pero nuestra complejidad cultural produce dificultades para definir las motivaciones de los comportamientos pretéritos. Trataremos de actualizar las evidencias que poseemos sobre antropofagia en el registro arqueológico, en particular para los períodos más antiguos y para el ámbito ibérico, tratando de plantear posibles motivos en cada caso y ver si hay patrones o tendencias a nivel de especie, época, sistema económico o creencias. Los casos documentados parecen avalar un canibalismo de tipo gastronómico entre los cazadores-recolectores simples, al que se le reviste de ritualidad entre los cazadores complejos. De todas formas, desde sus primeras manifestaciones en Atapuerca TD6, apreciamos una clara consciencia en la identificación y distinción de los seres humanos respecto a otras presas por parte de los homininos. Nada parece indicarnos territorialidad o violencia reiterada durante el Paleolítico. Las redes de intercambio y la reciprocidad debieron amortiguar los conflictos en épocas de escasez o en procesos de fisión-fusión de los grupos.   PALABRAS CLAVE: canibalismo, violencia, sociedad humana, tafonomía, Pleistoceno   ABSTRACT Consumption of members of the same species occurs in many organisms and it must have been practiced by humans during Prehistory, although archaeological evidence for this is scant. It is often possible to show interventions on the bodies, but we cannot prove meat ingestion. Neither is it easy to demonstrate the specific causes of each act of cannibalism. The evidence can be interpreted in terms of several hypotheses (equifinality). Progress has been made in characterizing knives and tool marks on bodies, but our cultural complexity produces difficulties in defining the motivations of behaviors. We will try to provide an update regarding the evidence of anthropophagy in the archaeological record, particularly for the most ancient periods and the Iberian area. We will try to outline reasons in each case and check for patterns regarding species, period, economic system and beliefs. Documented cases seem to show a gastronomic cannibalism between simple hunters-gatherers and a “ritualization” of this for complex hunters-gatherers. In any case, since its first appearance at the Atapuerca TD6 site, we note a clear conscience among hominine groups in terms of the identification and distinctiveness of humans by comparison to other animals. Nothing suggests territoriality or repeated violence during the Palaeolithic. Sharing of resources and reciprocity must have decreased conflicts in times of shortage or fusion/fission processes of groups.   KEY WORDS: cannibalism, violence, human society, taphonomy, Pleistocene

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