The Oxford Handbook of Neolithic Europe

by Chris Fowler

  Humans do not experience or record climate, but rather daily and seasonal weather, along with the occurrence of extreme events. There is little doubt that early farming communities would have been highly susceptible to extremes of weather including droughts and floods, and the increasing trend towards food storage through the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, and beyond is generally seen as insurance against shortages given sedentary conditions and an increasing population (Halstead 1999; Rosen 2007). Indeed one of the most common Neolithic features across Europe is the storage pit, often found in remarkable numbers (Garrow 2006).

  Whilst droughts and floods are the most obvious climatic hazards, others exist even in the relatively benign environment of Mediterranean Europe. These include volcanic eruptions in tectonically active areas, such as southern Italy, Anatolia, and the Greek Isles. Tephras (volcanic ash layers) are known from this period (Table 2.2) and many more fine tephras in the marine record (Lowe et al. 2007) are of high potential for improving environmental chronologies in southern Europe. Likewise, Iceland is the source of tephras found in mires in Scotland, northern Ireland, northern England, the Baltic States, and Scandinavia (Barber et al. 2008; Pilcher et al. 1996; Hang et al. 2006; Boygle 1998). However, even in the Mediterranean there is as yet little evidence for an eruption causing major population dislocation comparable to the Bronze Age Minoan civilization or Roman Pompeii. Essential to that narrative are perceptions of risk along with power, wealth, and opportunity, all of which would have to be included in any model of response at the societal level and below.

  One approach to linking environment and human actions in the landscape is through modelling, now common in natural sciences like geomorphology. Modelling has moved away from normalizing, rational, and optimizing economic models towards humans as ‘agents’ endowed with behavioural attributes, even perceptions, expressed in a logical rule-like fashion. Spatial modelling has in the past largely ignored perception, presenting a ‘theoretical model of the culture-environment interaction that takes no account of the cultural preconceptions and consequent constrained interpretations that social actors bring to their physical environment before they interact with it’ (Wheatley 1996, 76). Environmental reconstruction can include how past environments looked, felt, and even smelled but, just as with geographical information systems (GIS), environmental models should only be seen as a ‘screen on which to project behavioural and cognitive data’ (Maschner and Mithen 1996, 302) and part of a wider cognitive approach to archaeology (Renfrew and Zubrow 1997). Parallels exist with recent developments in ecology and geography, where agent-based modelling (ABM) models the behaviour of organisms in the face of changing local conditions (e.g. fishing, Kirby et al. 2004) and incorporates non-normative and humanistic data within an environmental framework (Bithell and Macmillan 2007).

  So far, applications include modelling food acquisition (hunting, gathering, basic agriculture) and the resultant soil erosion on limestone terrain around middle Neolithic settlements in southern France (Wainwright 2007), modelling change in the Anasazi culture in northern Arizona (Dean et al. 2000), and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer dynamics in the British Isles (Lake 2000). These studies have included the integration of a digital elevation model (DEM), palaeoenvironmental data, and—crucially—agents with rules of behaviour, agricultural or foraging capabilities, locations, and reproduction/mortality. The crucial point is that modelling does not seek to ‘explain’ the past or provide just another narrative, but to explore the construction of cultural interaction by challenging existing theories, demanding specification, and throwing up new questions. ABM is part of constructing culture from the bottom up, rather than generalized theorizing from the top down. In it, agents can be autonomous, goal-oriented, reactive, situated, cognitive, social, and capable of reproducing. Consequently, emergent properties can arise (Mithen 2000), a theme currently being explored in geomorphology and ecology (Harrison and Dunham 1999; Slaymaker 2005).

  CONCLUSIONS

  Many of the recent advances in environmental and Quaternary science—such as in sediment-based dating (Brown 2011), bio-markers (e.g. Jacob et al. 2009), soil DNA (Hebsgaard et al. 2009), and multi-element sediment scanning—greatly increase the potential to test competing hypotheses in prehistory. This is particularly pertinent as environmental change is commonly seen as rather less important to human society in Neolithic Europe than during the Bronze Age, Classical, and Medieval periods. This belief is partly a function of the longer time-scale and the dominant domestication-based narrative of Neolithic modernity (Renfrew 2007). This is changing for many reasons, such as the awareness of early domestication and agriculture in other regions (Bellwood 2005) and the remarkable advances in archaeogenetics, which are driving a more contingent, episodic, and non-purposive picture of domestication and agricultural adoption (Zohary et al. 1998). Environmental change has an essential role to play in replacing a functional meta-narrative with regionally differentiated, locally mediated, changing human–environment relations, at least in archaeology. Cognate disciplines such as Quaternary Science, however, appear to be developing in an opposite direction with new meta-narratives of global scale. For instance, Ruddiman’s ‘early Anthropocene’ hypothesis sees the reversal of the expected Interglacial CO2 and methane trend due to agriculture, particularly rice cultivation in the tropics, effectively forestalling the geological trend towards cooler conditions during the late Neolithic after c. 8000 BP (Ruddiman 2005). There is also a rise in deterministic connections between climate and cultural change. As Tipping (2012) has observed, we need to ‘stop rejecting deterministic arguments because they are unpleasant, but instead test them, reject them, or revise them’ (cf. Coombes and Barber 2005). Both the spatial variation in local climates and climate change must have been a component in cultural and social change, especially in early agriculture or ‘Neolithisation’ in Europe, but the questions are to what extent and in what ways. The answers can only come from integrated studies of environmental proxies with high-precision archaeological chronologies. This is why the re-dating of Neolithic monuments in Europe is a major advance (Whittle and Bayliss 2007). This will lead to a better integration of social agendas with landscape creation, a theme so actively promoted within environmental archaeology by John Evans (Evans 1975; Allen 2009). We also need to take on board some elements of the post-processual critique of environmental archaeology and work toward a more in-depth, sensual, and embodied view of the external environment of Neolithic agents in the landscape.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The first author must thank the members of PLUS (K. Barber, P. Hughes, P. Langdon, and J. Dearing) for commenting and assisting with drafts of this paper, and others including R. Tipping, M. Magny, K. Walsh, S. Richer, and Joerg Schibler for help and discussion. Thanks are also due to B. Smith for preparation of the figures.

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