Abstract
According to the Preface, this book focuses on natural climatic changes during the Holocene and their environmental and societal implications. The book was motivated by scientific progress in climate sciences, techniques for evaluating archaeological material, genetics and modelling, and also by the necessity for closer synergy (consilience) between the natural sciences and humanities. These admirable motivations can be detected in the four sections of the book, which cover (I) ‘Advances in Climate Reconstruction’, (II) ‘Tracing Major Human Migrations’, (III) ‘Human Responses to Climate throughout the Holocene’ and (IV) ‘Challenges Ahead’. Broadly speaking, both Sections I and II contain general background material. This is followed by detailed regional case studies on human-environmental interaction in Section III before the concluding chapters on future challenges of Section IV.
Within the first section, the editor’s introduction considers environmental reconstruction in the context of human history and civilisation. He introduces the changing climate system over geological time, palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of monsoonal subsystems in Asia and Africa, the terrestrial carbon cycle, the global warming hiatus (AD 1998–2013), recent applications of ancient DNA and archaeobotany, and human adaptation to Holocene environmental change. This reflects the wide-ranging content of the book with multiple themes that are quite loosely connected, which means a consistent focus is hard to find.
Also included in Section I are chapters on ‘Proxy indicators of climate in the past’ (Ouellet-Bernier and de Vernal), ‘Pleistocene glaciations’ (Crucifix), ‘Solar irradiance variability and Earth’s climate’ (Krivova) and ‘High resolution climate reconstruction over the last 2000 years’ (Wagner and Zorita). The proxy indicators focus effectively on the Holocene and usefully include the main indicators of seasonal climatic variations and historical information sources, as well as microfossil, chemical and isotopic composition of biological materials, and landforms and sediments. Disappointingly, the chapter on Pleistocene glaciations is true to its title, dealing with glacial-interglacial cycles, Dansgaard-Oeschger Events, and Heinrich Events, rather than glacier and climatic variations in the Holocene, which one would think should be the main theme in the context of this book. Devoting a whole chapter to solar irradiance variations, without including the possibility of volcanic forcing, presents a very incomplete picture of the likely causes of natural climatic variability. Similarly, the chapter on high-resolution climatic reconstruction of the last 2000 years leaves an obvious vacuum in relation to understanding events, including the collapse of relatively old civilisations, earlier in the Holocene. Thus, the first section of the book is a mixed bag of the highly relevant and the only marginally relevant, with important omissions.
Much the same can be said of the two relatively short chapters comprising Section II. ‘Migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa’ (Kardulias) is mostly concerned with the pre-Holocene. ‘Ancient-DNA and modern-DNA genetics can reveal past population movements’ (Voskarides) includes a greater proportion that is directly relevant to the Holocene, particularly the brief example relating to the colonisation of Cyprus and Crete.
In contrast, Section III is more focused, substantial and original. Here, seven of the eight chapters deal with regions of the Old World variously affected by different degrees of aridity and drought. Five chapters deal with North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and Arabia, while two extend coverage into Asia. The one chapter from the New World entitled ‘Climate change, Mesoamerica and the classic Maya collapse’ (Lucero and Larmon) considers the long and complex human-environmental relationships associated with the impact of drought in a tropical lowland setting. In ‘From “green” to “brown”: the archaeology of the Holocene Central Sahara’ (di Lernia) the focus changes to Late Pleistocene and early Holocene aridity, the African Humid Period and its aftermath in the currently arid environments of the Tadrart Acacus and Messak massifs.
This is followed by a chapter on the ‘Eastern borders of the Sahara and the relations with the Nile Valley and beyond’, where alternating wet and arid phases differentially affected human occupation and exchange between the extremely arid Egyptian Western Desert, with its oases in limestone depressions, and the Nile valley. Archaeohydrology continues as the major theme in the two detailed chapters on Arabia: ‘Human adaptation in Arabia: the role of hydraulic technologies’ (Charbonnier) and ‘Hydraulic cultures and hydrology under climatic change: north Arabian mid-Holocene pastoral and proto-oasis land use’ (Gebel and Wellbrock). The former chapter reviews early archaeological evidence of water management systems involving surface and groundwater from the Neolithic to the end of the Iron Age, emphasising differences in the development of technologies between the regions of Arabia and the lack of direct links to increasing aridity during the late Holocene. The latter chapter emphasises the trajectory from mobile pastoralism to oasis horticulturalism in northern Arabia, and exemplify how use of several sustainable water management systems enabled successful adaptation to increasing aridity.
The possibility of collapse, rather than adaptation, is the theme in Chapter 13: ‘Collapse of Bronze Age civilisations’ in Greece and elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean (Middleton). The author concludes that both the archaeological and palaeoclimatic evidence is too problematic to suggest either that an ‘Early Bronze Age Collapse’ (c. 2200 BC) could have been caused by the ‘4.2 ka BP climatic event’ or that a ‘Late Bronze Age Collapse’ (c. 1200 BC) was climate-change related. The last two chapters in Section III move the focus into Asia. In ‘The Iranian plateau and the Indus river basin’ (Petrie and Weeks), and ‘Interaction of climate, environment and humans in North and Central Asia during the Late Glacial and Holocene’ (Sala) it is again demonstrated that there is no necessary causal relationship when climatic changes appear to correlate with instances of cultural transformation. Various behaviours and ways of exploiting resources that accumulated over the course of the terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene were often reconstituted during the mid- to late Holocene. This facilitated the creation of new niches for sustainable subsistence. Collapse, instead of cultural evolution through adaptation, appears to have been a rare occurrence.
A diverse set of future challenges is identified in the final section of the book. All four chapters emphasise challenges for science and society in a modern world experiencing climate change. ‘Perspectives of climate monitoring in the satellite era’ (Tosca) emphasises the need for continuing and improved monitoring of the climate system. ‘Perspectives of clean energy and carbon dioxide capture, storage and utilisation’ (Koukouzas, Gemeni and Tsoukalas) advocates marketing strategies, technologies and policies that will accelerate the utilisation of CO2 products. ‘What lies ahead? The future of the Earth and Society as an adaptive system’ (Karpouzoglou and Mao) explores the concept of the Earth and society as a resilience-enhancing coupled system with the capacity to absorb, adapt and transform change. ‘Epimetron’ (Crucifix) sees the book as a contribution by historians, archaeologists and anthropologists to solving the puzzle of reducing global energy and resource needs without societal collapse. Unfortunately, little is said in any of these chapters about how to overcome the difficulties of interpreting archaeological evidence of cultural change and testing hypotheses about possible climatic drivers of cultural change. These are surely the main challenges arising from the case-study chapters of the book!
Complexity in human-environmental relationships during the Holocene is the major theme of this book. Its main contribution is in elucidating how drought may have impacted the civilisations/societies that existed in areas with different degrees of aridity. The main strength of the book lies in its case studies, which exemplify the difficulties of reaching conclusions about climatic causes for cultural events based on archaeological evidence. However, despite containing a chapter on North and Central Asia, the book notably neglects studies from high latitudes, where cold temperatures are likely to be more important than drought in providing potential links between climate and cultural change. The title of the book suggests a more comprehensive and balanced account that would better live up to the editor’s ambitious intentions. Nevertheless, it is a useful compilation and many parts of the book will interest Holocene scientists for different reasons.