Tough Times: The Archaeology of Crisis and Recovery: Proceedings of the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford conferences in 2010 and 2011 9781407310909, 9781407340609

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BAR S2478 2013 VAN DER WILT & MARTÍNEZ JIMÉNEZ (Eds) TOUGH TIMES

B A R

Tough Times: The Archaeology of Crisis and Recovery Proceedings of the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford conferences in 2010 and 2011 Edited by

Elsbeth M. van der Wilt Javier Martínez Jiménez with help from Guido Petruccioli

BAR International Series 2478 2013

Tough Times: The Archaeology of Crisis and Recovery Proceedings of the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford conferences in 2010 and 2011 Edited by

Elsbeth M. van der Wilt Javier Martínez Jiménez with help from Guido Petruccioli

BAR International Series 2478 2013

ISBN 9781407310909 paperback ISBN 9781407340609 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407310909 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

BAR

PUBLISHING

Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Crisis? What crisis? 5 Peter Mitchell Chapter 3 Parables of Decline: Popular Fears and the Use of Crises in Aegean Archaeological Interpretation 13 Stephen O’Brien Chapter 4 ‘Five Feet High and Rising’: Environmental Crises and the Art of Prehistoric Scandinavia 23 Courtney Nimura Chapter 5 Collapse, Climate Change and Conflict: A Profile of Crisis and Response in Late Andean Highland Prehistory 43 Lucas C. Kellett Chapter 6 People Under Siege in the Fourth-Century Polis: Aeneas the Tactician Applied to Olynthos, 348 BC 57 Joo-Rak Son Chapter 7 Crisis or Not? Living Conditions in Pompeii in ad 79 – Insula ix.3 As a Case Study 67 Heini Ynnilä Chapter 8 Crisis or Crises? The End of Roman Towns in Iberia, Between the Late Roman and the Early Umayyad Periods 77 Javier Martínez Jiménez Chapter 9 A Combined Approach Coupling Direct and Indirect Methods for Tracing Malaria in Past Populations 91 Natacha Jacquemard Chapter 10 Engraving Social Values: Neo-palatial Glyptic Cult-scenes as Indicators of Social Instability? 101 Céline Murphy Chapter 11 Warfare and the Recovery from Palatial Collapse in the 12th century BC: a Case Study of the Argolid and Achaea 109 Matthew Lloyd Chapter 12 The Late Prehistoric ‘Dark Age’ in Ireland and Climate Fluctuation: Buffering Strategies and the Agency of the Environment 115 Philip Stastney’ Chapter 13 Bronze Age Hoarding in the Thames Valley: A Response to Crisis? 125 Camille Shepherd Chapter 14 Iranian Metallurgy and Disruptions in Trade Routes at the End of the Second Millennium BC 129 Aurélie Cuénod Chapter 15 Painted Politics: Ambiguity as Social Strategy in First Century BCE Pompeii 141 Lynley McAlpine

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Chapter 16 The Impact of Late Antique Crises in Noricum Ripense: Depopulation vs. Invisible People Barbara Hausmair Chapter 17 Old and New Elites in the Visigothic Kingdom (AD 550-650) Aitor Fernández Delgado Javier Martínez Jiménez Carlos Tejerizo García

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Chapter 1

Introduction This volume contains the combined proceedings of two consecutive conferences organised by Graduate Archaeology at Oxford (GAO) to promote communication between graduate students in all disciplines related to archaeology. Reflecting the current difficult economic climate and austerity measures, both conferences explored challenging times and adaptive strategies in the past. Both conferences were very well attended, and the presenters were an even mix of students from Oxford, elsewhere in Britain, and beyond.

the issue of crisis and recovery from a variety of angles but showed similar responses and patterns across different periods and regions. Without doubt, a remarkable effort was made to identify crises in the archeological record that went beyond those described in written sources. Topics included osteology, diet, wall paintings, changing urban townscapes, and psychological perspectives on trauma, as well as critical re-analyses of previous interpretations, including those based on political propaganda. There was even a paper (not included in this volume) on the development and subsequent crisis of modern professional archaeology. Unfortunately, not all papers and posters are included here, but a full list of all the presentations is provided at the end of this introduction.

GAO is a society for all graduate students of archaeology and related disciplines with an interest in archaeology at Oxford University. It organises regular social meetings and graduate skills seminars. Its main objectives are to create a social network and to promote communication between students of the different subdivisions within the Institute of Archaeology: prehistory, archaeological science, Classical archaeology, and landscape and maritime archaeology, as well as regional specialisations. The early years of GAO are shrouded in mystery; it is clear, thanks to Peter Haarer, that in 1994 the old Graduate Archaeology At Oxford (GAAO) was renamed as GAO. Since its creation, GAO has actively organised social and scientific events including talks, courses, and seminars.

Finally, it is worth remembering that archaeology generates our own history, and in times of crisis it can be a resource for reflecting on past mistakes and learning from previous solutions. These papers are thus offered as timely, and possibly useful, parallels to our own situation, and we hope that it will not be too long before another GAO Committee can organize an annual conference on ‘Renewal and Restoration: The Archaeology of Recovery!’ We would like to thank many people for their help both with the organization of the conference and during the process of preparing this manuscript for publication. First we would like to thank the GAO committees of 2010 and 2011 (of which we were a part) for their support, in particular Sharen Lee, Lisa Lodwick, Mark McKerracher, and Kathryn Reusch for their help in the initial review stages of the manuscripts; departmental staff also showed their support, in particular we are grateful to Peter Mitchell, Chris Gosden and Helena Hamerow for their talks at the conferences. The Institute of Archaeology and Ioannou Classics Centre provided logistical and administrative support, and Anne Smith deserves particular mention here. GAO would not exist without the annual financial contribution provided by the School of Archaeology; we would like to express our appreciation here for the School’s continued support. Of course, we are also indebted to all referees without whose reviews the current manuscript would have looked significantly different. And finally, Charlotte Potts was an invaluable help during the (copy-) editing process, thank you so much for your advice and comments at every stage!

Within this range of activities, the most important event is the annual conference. Every year the GAO committee chooses an enticing topic, without imposing any restriction on time, place, or perspective. In April 2010, inspired by the general slowing of the global economy, we chose the provocative title ‘Death, Destruction, Downturn: The Archaeology of Crisis.’ The start of the conference coincided with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, severely disrupting air traffic in the days leading up to the event. It was touch-and-go for some speakers to make it to the conference on time, and a reminder of the acuteness of some crises! In 2011 we followed up on this theme with ‘The Archaeology of Recovery: Adaptive Strategies in Response to Crisis.’ Papers covered various aspects of postcrisis situations and processes of adaptation to completely new environments, both in broad historical periods and in very particular circumstances affecting smaller populations. The conferences were a great success, due in part to the presence of many graduate students from other universities in Britain and abroad, including Austria, France, Poland, Spain, and the United States, coming together for lively discussion and the exchange of ideas. The papers addressed

Javier Martínez Jiménez Guido Petruccioli Elsbeth van der Wilt

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Tough Times

List of papers (with affiliations as listed at the time):

Mark Anderson: Pathways to prosperity: Metallurgical specialisation as a strategic response to crisis at Marothodi: An early 19th century Tlokwa capital in the Pilanesberg region of South Africa. Lauren Cadwallader (Cambridge): Diet in an extreme environment: An isotopic investigation into dietary, environmental and social change in the Lower Ica Valley, Peru. Aurélie Cuénod (Oxford): Adaptation of the Iranian metallurgical industry to major disruptions in trade routes at the end of the second millennium BC: The appearance of iron and the recycling of bronze. Bela Dimova (University College London): Bulgarian archaeology through the ‘Age of Extremes’. Aitor Fernández, (Madrid Autonomous University), Javier Martínez (Oxford), Carlos Tejerizo (Basque Country University): New and old elites in the Visigothic kingdom (550-650 AD). Tyler Franconi (Oxford): Aequauit Latia subi quondam Gallia Cannas: The provinces of Roman Germany in the 4th century AD. Barbara Hausmair (Vienna): The impact of the crises of Late Antiquity in the Roman Province Noricum Ripense: Is the lack of archaeological evidence either the result of depopulation or insufficient research? Timothy Jones: ‘Cives arma poscunt quibus moenia defendunt’: Military recruitment in times of crisis. Matthew Lloyd (Oxford): What does the evidence for warfare in Late Helladic IIIC suggest about the recovery from the palatial collapse in Greece at the beginning of the twelfth century BC? Michael Martins (York University, Canada): Chronic malnutrition and the effect on the role of ancient Roman women. Lynley McAlpine (Michigan): Painted Politics: Ambiguity as social strategy in first century BCE Pompeii. Mark McGranaghan (Oxford): Sorcerer’s Ways: |Xam (“Bushman”) hunter-gatherer belief and practice in the context of colonial encroachment. Céline Murphy (Kent): The depiction of gestures of formalism in Minoan cult scenes: A response to social crisis? Erika Nitsch (Oxford): Equality as a response to crisis? Stable isotope evidence for diet change in post-Roman Italy. Catalin Nicolae Popa (Cambridge): No Ancestors No Cry? The crisis of ‘objectivity’ in Romanian Late Iron Age archaeology. Amy Prendergast (Cambridge): A palaeoclimatic framework for the late Pleistocene human occupation of the North African Mediterranean: Correlating marine and terrestrial proxies from the stable isotope analysis of mollusks. Gabriela Sotomayor (Oxford): Ptolemaic jewellery: A response to political crisis. Philip Stastney (Reading): The late prehistoric ‘Dark Age’ in Ireland and climate fluctuation: Effects of change and ‘buffering strategies’.

Death, Destruction, Downturn: The Archaeology of Crisis (2010) Nicholas Burrell (Queensland): Roman economy, army and religion under the Antonine Plague in the late 2nd Century AD. Laine Clark-Balzan (Oxford): Resolving crisis beyond radiocarbon: Bayesian modeling and optically stimulated luminescence. Francesca Conselvan (Oxford): The transformation of villas in Late Antiquity (III-VI centuries). Girolamo de Simone (Oxford): The Pompeian eruption of Vesuvius between catastrophe and opportunity. Oana Dominte (Oxford): Facing Crisis: The deliberate breaking of Dogu ceramic figurines during the Jomon period in ancient Japan. Agnieszka Fulinska (Krakow): The end of Hellenism and the rise of the new world order on coins. Natacha Jacquemard (Pasteur Institute, Paris, and Nice): A combined approach coupling direct and indirect methods to trace malaria in past populations. Lucas Kellet (University of New Mexico, Albuquerque): Collapse, climate change and conflict: A profile of crisis and response in Late Andean highland prehistory. John Lansdowne (Oxford): Six months in Athens: Chronicling the crisis & assessing the damage of Venice’s disastrous occupation, 1687-88. Edmund Mackenzie (Belfast): An examination of the Black Death in England from an environmental perspective. Javier Martínez (Oxford): Crisis or crises? The end of Roman towns in Iberia, 400 – 800 AD. Jennifer Muslin (Buffalo): Invasion and the scholarly imagination: Interpretations of Mycenaean and Indus Valley civilization collapse. Courtney Nimura (Reading): ‘Five feet high and rising’: Environmental catastrophes and the portable art of Mesolithic Denmark. Erika Nitsch (Oxford): Won’t somebody please think of the children? Social, economic and political change in post-Roman Italy and its implications for child health and nutrition. Stephen O’Brien (Liverpool): Parables of decline: Popular fears and the use of crises in archaeological explanation. Joo-Rak Son (Cornell): People under siege at Olynthos, 348 BC. Rachel Wood (Oxford): The extinction of a human species: A new chronology and its implications. Heini Ynnila (Oxford): Crisis or not? Living conditions in Pompeii in AD 79: Insula IX.3 as a case study. The Archaeology of Recovery: Adaptive Strategies in Response to Crisis (2011) Kenneth Aitchison (Landward Research Ltd / Edinburgh): Archaeology in the age of austerity: “The credit crunch of 2007 became the financial crash of 2008 and the recession of 2009”.

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Introduction

2011 - posters

Tracey O’Leary (Liverpool): Religious continuity in Britain from the Roman occupation to the early Middle Ages. Philippa Puzey-Broomhead (Oxford): Revolution, resettlement and resentment: The Black Loyalist experience in Nova Scotia. Camille Shepherd (Winchester): Bronze Age hoarding in the Itchen and Thames river valleys: A response to political crisis?

Christina Collins (Sheffield): Population change in the Late Glacial Refugium of Southwest France. Victoria Ginn (Belfast): Middle–Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–600 BC) settlement structure in Ireland: The driving factors. Mark McKerracher (Oxford): Agricultural development in Middle Saxon England - the story so far.

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Chapter 2 Crisis? What crisis? Peter Mitchell School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Abstract: Crises, in one form or another, are a longstanding subject of archaeological enquiry, often, but not always under the heading of civilisational or societal ‘collapse’. This paper considers why this should be so and in what ways the archaeological study of crises might be advanced. Four factors are singled out for attention: the importance of resolving situations of crisis in both time and space; the necessity of disentangling short term from longer term causes and the utility here of an annaliste approach; the requirement to focus on institutional and environmental constraints in investigating a given society’s capacity to respond to challenges; and the need to identify clearly the populations affected by crises given that human societies are internally differentiated, often in very complex ways. The paper concludes by considering some of the challenges facing archaeology as a profession confronted with a range of contemporary crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental sustainability. Keywords: crisis; collapse; resilience; causation; climate change

Introduction

processes and constraints important for understanding how and why profound consequences can flow from such outof-the-blue or ‘Black Swan’ events (cf. Taleb 2007). Scale, then, as well as chronological control, is among the issues with which the archaeological study of crisis must deal.

Death, destruction, downturn, three of the themes explored in this volume render this introductory essay akin to the proverbial fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. Held in Oxford in April 2010, midway through a British general election campaign in which the aftermath of the 2008 banking collapses, the strains of an unparalleled budgetary deficit and the shadow of global warming all featured heavily, the topicality of a conference devoted to the archaeological investigation of crisis and crises was obvious and the themes discussed have only gained in resonance since. Discussing those themes I begin by setting out some thoughts on what constitutes a crisis, what, in other words, are some of its defining characteristics. That done, I ask why crises should be of interest to us as archaeologists and how we should approach their study. In conclusion, I consider three of the challenges for archaeological practice thrown up by crises in the contemporary world.

Three other characteristics are worth noting. First, crises typically create uncertainty, challenging the preconceptions on which people have previously depended. Second, and partly as a result of this, they bring with them elements of threat, difficulty and distress - in other words, they are generally viewed as negative. But third, they are, or at least they can be, transformational, turning points in the lives of individuals and in the history of human societies. This last characteristic draws directly upon the original Greek term from which the English word derives for, to the Greeks, krisiV (krisis) meant ‘decision’ or ‘judgement’. This too is important because it underlines the significance of judgement and analysis for our understanding of crises - not only the decisions and the decision-making processes of actors in the past, but also the criteria by which we assess and analyse those decisions and their consequences in the archaeological record of the present.

Defining crises We all, I imagine, have an intuitive understanding of what constitutes a crisis, one key feature being the unexpected and sudden nature of the event or events in question. For archaeology, the appropriateness of these adjectives may, however, be moot, given the difficulty that we often face in pinpointing events in time and because too much emphasis on the sudden may detract attention from longer term

One last preliminary comment: reading into the literature - and reflected in the titles of some of the papers here - one might sense a juxtaposition between those crises that are natural in origin, what insurance salesmen are prone to describe as ‘Acts of God’, and those that are man-made.

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Tough Times

Empire able to get through the multiple, repeated and reinforcing military, political, economic and demographic crises of the mid-third century, only - in the West - to break down in the course of the fifth (Ward-Perkins 2005, 34)? What similarities and differences are discernible over a much longer time frame if we compare and contrast the cycles of political integration and fragmentation that marked Pharaonic Egypt from the unity of Old Kingdom times to the disunity of the First Intermediate Period, from the Middle Kingdom to the Second Intermediate Period and from the New Kingdom to much of the millennium that followed (Shaw 2000)? Or, to refer to the paper by Lucas Kellett that is included here (chapter 5), between the successive cycles of cultural integration and fragmentation that have traditionally served to organise our understanding of Andean prehistory (Bruhns 1994)?

Some of the topics considered at the Oxford conference certainly have an element of the former about them, the Black Death and the Antonine Plague for example (cf. Benedictow 2004; Bruun 2007), or, perhaps less equivocally, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (see Scarth 2009). But a moment’s thought shows that this differentiation is, at best, a misleading one. Acts of God, natural disasters, are only of interest to us as archaeologists if they can be shown to have affected people - localised volcanic eruptions in New Zealand, for instance, before Maori settlement of those islands early in the second millennium AD would not be of archaeological concern. Conversely, man-made disasters neither occur within an ecological vacuum nor come free of ecological consequences: rather, it is the intersection of cultural and natural in bringing about a situation of crisis and the way they interact in its development and resolution that is of interest. The 2010 eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, which caused massive disruption to air travel across Europe, precisely as the Oxford conference took place only underlines this point.

Episodes of climate change, especially when pronounced, set a particularly tempting framework for such comparisons. Looking back over the last two decades, the volumes edited by Clive Gamble and Olga Soffer (Gamble and Soffer 1990; Soffer and Gamble 1990) on the Last Glacial Maximum and by Lawrence Straus et al. (1996) on the PleistoceneHolocene transition are obvious examples; so too Brian Fagan’s (2001) more recent (and more popular) book on the Little Ice Age. If any one is up for the challenge, the sharp, ±400 year long global cooling that set in around 6200 cal. BC, the 8.2 kyr event (Alley et al. 1997), is another such episode still in need of global comparative study (though see, for example, Wenninger et al. 2006).

Why crises are of interest So why are crises of interest? One major reason is that they afford us an opportunity to focus quite tightly upon the workings of a community or culture at a particular moment of decision. Confronted with the challenges of an unexpected or sudden event pregnant with uncertainty, possibility and distress, we may be better able to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of that society’s structures and assess its resilience, its capacity for renewal or collapse.

But the possibilities of comparison and the opportunity to expose and explore a society’s inner workings are only two - and both deeply intellectual - reasons for making crisis and crises a focus of archaeological study. More compelling, if less obvious, our interest in situations of crisis, and perhaps especially with studies of the collapse of past civilisations, carries with it shades of voyeurism, of comfort, of ‘there but for the grace of God go we’. Indeed, one could argue that the very practice of archaeology is a means of coping with, of confronting and resisting, the greatest crisis of all, death and the extinction that goes with it (cf. Tarlow 1999). By recovering and interpreting the remains of past societies - and literally sometimes the remains of deceased individuals - we scorn death, laugh in its face and simultaneously attempt - however unconvincingly and, ultimately, unsuccessfully - to reassure ourselves of our own immortality as by our actions we confer a kind of immortality and resurrection upon the dead themselves. In coming close to an inversion of the structure and meaning of the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Burial of the Dead that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, archaeology thus obeys the imploring words of Dylan Thomas (Gardner 1972, 942) ‘Do not go gentle into that good night...Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’

A second source of interest derives from the fact that the experience of crisis is a not uncommon one: volcanic eruptions, floods, pestilence, episodes of climate change, imperial over-reach, invasion and so on are not unique to any one part of that world or any one period of time. Precisely because of this the study of crises lends itself extremely well to a comparative approach, with systems collapse, the fall of civilisation, a longstanding topic of academic concern, from St Augustine writing the City of God (Civitas Dei) as he lived through the breakdown of the Western Roman Empire (Heather 2005; Ward-Perkins 2005) and ‘Ibn Khaldûn (Dawood 1967) writing about the relations between nomads, city dwellers and dynasts in the medieval Maghreb to Jared Diamond’s (2005) recent bestseller and the riposte to it now edited by Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee (2009; see also Tainter 1988, 2008; Liverani 2009). The diverse impacts of geological catastrophes, especially volcanic disasters, have also proven attractive (Grattan 2006; Grattan and Torrence 2007; McGuire et al. 2000; Torrence and Grattan 2002), along with those of recurrent climatic phenomena, such as El Niño events (Bawden and Reycraft 2000; van Buren 2001). Of course, no single crisis is an exact match for another. Instead, it is the opportunity to examine broadly parallel events that did not have precisely the same outcomes that draws our attention. How, for example, was the Roman

Ironically, of course, the very process whereby we attempt this places the resources that we employ for our re-enactment of past lives and deaths in their own state

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Peter Mitchell: Crisis? What crisis?

Crises of causation

of crisis: excavation necessarily involves destruction, and our licensed destruction of archaeological resources is massively compounded by further losses to erosion, decay and human activity, as well as by an insufficiency of funds, personnel, time and efforts at publication. Indeed, searching on the Internet for references to ‘crisis’ and ‘archaeology’ turns up little more than repeated hand wringing about this.

Chronology is, of course, a sine qua non for gaining an understanding of causation: we need to know what happened before what. But we also need to distinguish between causal processes operating over different scales of time and space, something deeply relevant to explaining why what at first sight might seem to have been a relatively trivial stress, of a kind previously handled with ease, in fact provoked far-reaching, transformational change. One relevant observation here relates to the old adage about the straw that breaks the camel’s back: several straws, even several bales, may be perfectly manageable, but eventually the stress becomes so great that the camel just sits down - or worse! A not unrelated concern is the truism that events have consequences, and that human actions, in particular, including those taken in response to previous situations of crisis, have consequences that are all too often unintended and unforeseeable. What in one context may be sensible decisions that - at least for a time - resolve a particular problem may turn out only to have deferred it, or to have so altered the rules of the game, the structures and capabilities of a society, that, faced with an additional, or even comparable stress years, generations, or centuries later, the capacity for further successful response is impaired. Peter Heather’s (2005) powerful analysis of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire is an excellent case in point: handing over chunks of territory and revenue works wonderfully as a short-term expedient for dealing with barbarian invaders who can then be tapped for military service and alliance; it ceases to be effective when so much land and taxes have been alienated or lost that the key political and military institutions of the state can no longer function.

Dealing with crisis: what do we need to know? So what, then, ought we to be considering? How, as archaeologists, should we be investigating situations of crisis? What questions or topics merit particular attention? I identify four: the importance of resolving time and space; the necessity of disentangling proximate causes from those operating over longer timeframes; the significance of identifying constraints and possibilities in what societies can do to tackle crises; and the need to answer the question, crisis for whom? The search for uniform answers or modes of enquiry may be misplaced, but I suggest that these four topics are of concern to all the papers discussed here. I take each in turn. Resolving time and space If crises are indeed sudden events then it is essential that we know when they occurred and when they occurred in relation to other features of the archaeological record. We also need to know with clarity the spatial extent of the triggers provoking the crisis and the geographical range of the latter’s consequences. Close definition in space and in time, but a sound and precise chronology above all, will be essential, concerns reflected here, for example, in the many papers examining crises in the Classical, medieval and early modern worlds for which textual, numismatic and epigraphic sources provide a level of detail usually unreachable in prehistoric contexts, as well as unrivalled opportunities for pinning down sequences of events (cf. Heather 2005). I doubt it is coincidental that two of the relatively smaller number of papers dealing with purely prehistoric contexts that the 2010 Oxford conference brought together, those by Louise Clark-Balzan on the Aterian Industry of North Africa and Rachel Wood on the extinction of Neanderthals in Iberia, paid such high regard to issues of dating. And dating advances can themselves readily alter the framework within which we think of change and thus of crisis: the suggestion from studies of lake deposits in Lough Monreagh, Ireland, that the Younger Dryas began within a matter of months (Ravillous 2009) carries massive implications for how human societies - and ecological communities as a whole - contended with a drop in annual mean temperatures of some 6˚C around 12,800 years ago. What might previously have been thought of as a gradual adjustment to increasingly cold conditions, extending over many years, if not generations, suddenly assumes a much harsher and challenging hue, comparable to the similarly abrupt rise in temperatures that marked the end of the same cold phase some 1300 years later (Alley 2000).

It is not a new suggestion, but an analytical framework inspired by French historian Fernand Braudel (1972) and his annaliste associates seems to me to offer a useful means of structuring our thoughts about causation in general and about the causation of crises in particular. Acknowledging the difficulties in its application thus far (Bintliff 1991; Holdaway and Wandsnider 2008), a re-engagement with this kind of time-perspectivist approach (Bailey 1983) seems to me to be merited if crisis is to become a central organising concept for archaeological study, for climatic, ecological, economic and political factors do frequently move at different paces and it is the intersection of weaknesses brought about by processes operating over generations or centuries with shorter term, sudden triggers (plague, invasion, political decision-making, weather etc.) that may transform a problem into a crisis and a crisis into a catastrophe. Constraints and possibilities How far this turns out to be the case depends heavily on a society’s ability to respond to changing circumstances and thus on the constraints affecting it and the possibilities for reaching judgements, taking action and effecting change

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Tough Times

good, but archaeological research disproportionately focuses on them, their actions and the material culture associated with them at the expense of the quotidian, day-to-day lives of the majority: certainly this is true of sub-Saharan Africa, where for the last 2000 years research on towns, rulers, large monuments and places of historical importance vastly outweighs the energy devoted to studying rural settlements or domestic space (Stahl 1999, 2004). But at the same time, let us not fall into the trap of assuming that it is always the poor or the politically disadvantaged who are most susceptible to crises: rather, those most removed from subsistence production may be those most exposed to shortfalls in food or disruptions in supply, those with most to lose materially or politically sometimes those for whom sudden, unexpected events pose the greatest potential loss and challenge. In every case, we can be sure that capacities for resilience will not be evenly distributed, that the opportunities to profit from crises rather than suffer from them will be differentiated by class, gender, status and age.

open to it. Critical here is the need to focus on processes of decision-making, on political institutions and on systems of information gathering and information processing. All will be moulded by a given society’s worldview, its understanding of cause and effect, of its place in the world and of its own history (e.g. Jennings 2008). The emphasis on matters of ideology in several of the papers presented at the 2010 Oxford conference, for example those of Courtney Nimura on Mesolithic Denmark and Agnieszka Fulinska on coinage as a propaganda medium around the time of the Battle of Actium, is thus well-placed. To give another example, consider how far Aztec expectations about the return of the god Quetzalcoatl may have influenced the decisions taken in relation to the arrival of Cortes in Mexico in 1519? Or would Aztec hegemony soon have collapsed anyway, the intrusion of Spanish arms and smallpox notwithstanding, as Geoffrey Conrad and Arthur Demarest (1984) tenaciously argue in their thought-provoking study Religion and Empire? One way of exploring the roles of institutional constraints - by which I mean not just political structures, but also economic systems, climatic and ecological factors and demographic variables, among others - is to engage in thought experiments of the kind that caught the eye of historians such as Niall Ferguson (1998) in the 1990s: what alternatives existed? How far could they have been pursued? Why were they not taken? This counterfactual task is no doubt easier when working in a historical time frame and with written sources, but more explicit posing of the same questions might do archaeologists no harm: two inter-related examples are discussed by Peter Richerson et al. (2002), who argue that food-production was impossible in the Pleistocene, but mandatory in the Holocene, and Doron Shultziner et al. (2010), who contend that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, even those of the Upper Palaeolithic, had no option but to remain egalitarian and politically simple, in contrast to arguments by others (e.g. Mellars 1985; Soffer 1985) for much greater levels of social complexity among at least some Gravettian and Magdalenian groups.

Crises for today: conflict, plague and climate change If these considerations apply to our investigations of crisis in the past then they also form part of archaeological practice in the present because that practice itself often takes place in situations of crisis. An obvious example is where archaeologists work in contexts that have recently emerged from conflict, whether war, civil war or situations of oppression. Sadly, Africa, the focus of my own research, offers many such examples, in some of which archaeology has become an important contributor to the creation, recreation and sanctioning of new - and themselves often conflicted - understandings of the past: in post-genocide Rwanda, for example, it is promoted as a means of building national unity (Giblin 2010), while in post-liberation South Africa it has been invoked by groups making claims to land lost under apartheid, creating challenges for archaeologists reared in a situation where indigenous communities had little, if any, legal standing vis-à-vis the control or investigation of archaeological sites, burials included (Meskell 2005). More widely, the HIV/AIDS pandemic constitutes a grave threat to many African populations: in Lesotho, where I am currently directing a project (Arthur and Mitchell 2010), one-third of all adults are infected. Faced with poverty, plague and many other calls on its resources, is it realistic - is it even morally defensible - for the government of such a country to invest in archaeology? And, if it does, or if foreign archaeologists work there, what responsibilities follow? At the very least, the imperatives to build local capacity, engage with local communities and contribute to the survival of local memory - for example, through documenting living landscapes - are made more acute.

Crisis? Whose crisis? (with apologies to former British Prime Minister James Callaghan as misreported in The Sun, January 11th 1979) To mention egalitarianism and complexity is to knock on the door of my fourth point: for whom is a crisis a crisis? For all or just for some? Societies are always differentiated, if only by the most basic variables such as gender and age, and their members will thus differently experience and react to situations of crisis. At the 2010 Oxford conference Joo-Rak Son’s paper (chapter 6) on the Macedonian siege of Olynthos and Erika Nitsch’s plea to consider children when investigating social, economic and political change in post-Roman Italy were both cases in point. They also emphasised something that many studies of crisis - or at least of civilisational collapse and complex societies in general - too frequently obscure: élites are all well and

Let me return for a moment to another quotation from British political history: Margaret Thatcher, speaking to a party conference during the 1982 Falklands War, supposedly commented that ‘It is exciting to have a real crisis on your hands when you have spent half of

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Peter Mitchell: Crisis? What crisis?

your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment’ (Young 1989, 273).1 Ironically, it is precisely the environment - both climate change and the loss of biodiversity - that constitutes perhaps the greatest crisis of our lifetimes, and, in fairness, a few years later Lady Thatcher was one of the very first political leaders to campaign for action against global warming, not least when addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1989. Do we, as archaeologists, have particular responsibilities in this regard and can we defend expenditure on archaeology in the face of the harsh realities that it will likely bring? As a profession, we have thus far done little to address either question, or the more general topic of archaeology’s relevance to debates about environmental sustainability in the present, but in ending this introduction let me suggest some ways in which we might make a contribution (see also Mitchell 2008; Rowland 2010; van de Noort 2011). First, we are in the privileged position of being able to make sense of the impact of climate change as we specialise in studying long-term processes and human history within a broadly ecological context, even as we rightly recognise the significance of individual agency and social structures. Few, if any, other disciplines can match us in being able to marshal the evidence of human activity and palaeoenvironmental change or in examining the interaction of climatic, ecological, demographic, economic, sociopolitical and ideological variables over both the longue durée and at the level of specific events.

grasps what may happen and, in his words, ‘suddenly be very, very afraid’, then archaeologists also have a role as visionaries of hope, for our subject attests also to the resilience of human societies when faced with situations of crisis. As McAnany and Yoffee’s (2009) new book points out, instances of wholesale societal collapse have been far fewer than some readings of Diamond (2005) might suggest, even in that most well-known example, that of the Classic Maya (Houston and Inomata 2009; Webster 2002). Global warming also poses challenges and opportunities for archaeological practice. Monuments are already being damaged, sites lost to accelerating coastal erosion, but at the same time deglaciation and thawing offer new opportunities: Italy’s Ötzi ice mummy (Spindler 1994) and its equally spectacular North American counterpart (Beattie et al. 2000) are well known cases in point. Faced, as usual, with limited resources, one sound prediction is that striking an appropriate balance between ‘research’ and ‘rescue’ will become even more critical and contentious than hitherto. More positively, we may also be able to help mitigate the impacts of climate change by applying insights from the past to present day land-use strategies: the rebuilding of preHispanic water management systems and experimentation with traditional cultivation practices offers one example, already underway for some time (e.g. Isendahl 2008; Kendall 1997), the development of restoration ecology (i.e. wildlife and nature management intended to restore landscapes to a status quo ante, such as before the arrival of invasive species of European introduction) another (Hayashida 2005; Lauwerier and Plug 2004; Millar and Brubaker 2006). Information on past ecologies and cultural practices must necessarily draw on archaeological research and recognition that all ‘natural’ ecosystems are, to a degree, artefacts of past human activity again emphasises the complexity of the relations between people and planet.

One particular contribution that we can make is to help construct a detailed record of past climate and environmental change, a necessity for developing - and checking through ‘hindcasting’ - global climatic models (e.g. Turney et al. 2005). Another is educational, to convey to public and policymakers alike the speed and scale of climate change and the dramatic consequences that it may entail. The great public interest in our work and its presentation via the media and in museums gives us a crucial role here in combating denial about the possible extent and implications of climate change. Moreover, and without requiring the narrowly deterministic views once associated with some practitioners of the New Archaeology, the holistic, systemic view of societies that we typically hold and research can reinforce an ecologically contextualised view of human actions and their consequences, intended and unintended, and help propagate this through all levels of education, our own teaching included. But this is not to cast us as mere prophets of doom. If, as Mark Brayne (2007, 7) has argued, we can anticipate a ‘seismic shift of consciousness’ at the moment when global public opinion

Two final points: global warming and environmental sustainability also raise important issues of archaeological ethics: how do archaeologists reduce their carbon footprint? Are international conferences in exotic locations defensible? Ought alternative (virtual) meetings to be promoted instead? Should funding agencies be asked to offset the carbon costs of travel and fieldwork? These are questions for debate, but others can hardly take us seriously unless we address them. Also up for discussion are the theoretical frameworks within which we conduct and present research. As will be evident, for me these must emphasise two strands of thought, a commitment to thinking about human societies within a strongly ecological framework and a retention of a strong sense of human agency and empowerment. The framework of historical ecology (Balée 1998; Balée and Erickson 2006; Crumley 1994) may be one integrative model for us to pursue if we choose actively to resist, rather than passively accept, our part in the climatic and ecological crises unfolding around us.

1 Like the misreporting of James Callaghan’s remark on returning to Britain from a G7 meeting in January 1979 that prefaced the previous section, this quotation too turns out to be apocryphal, although it serves my rhetorical purpose here well enough. What Lady Thatcher actually said at the end of her speech was ‘What really thrilled me, having spent so much of my lifetime in Parliament, and talking about things like inflation, Social Security benefits, housing problems, environmental problems and so on, is that when it really came to the test, what’s thrilled people wasn’t those things, what thrilled people was once again being able to serve a great cause, the cause of liberty’ [i.e. the liberation of the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion] (Margaret Thatcher Foundation 2010).

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References

Ferguson, N. (ed.) 1998. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London, Macmillan. Gamble, C. S. and Soffer, O. (eds) 1990. The World at 18 000 BP: Volume Two Low Latitudes. London, Unwin Hyman. Gardner, H. (ed.) 1972. The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Giblin, J. D. 2010. Re-Constructing the Past in PostGenocide Rwanda: An Archaeological Contribution. Unpublished PhD thesis, University College, London. Grattan, J. P. 2006. Aspects of Armageddon: An exploration of the role of volcanic eruptions in human history and civilization. Quaternary International 151, 10-8. Grattan, J. P. and Torrence, R. (eds) 2007. Living Under the Shadow: The Cultural Impacts of Volcanic Eruptions. Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press. Hayashida, F. M. 2005. Archaeology, ecological history and conservation. Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 43-65. Heather, P. 2005. The Fall of the Roman Empire. London, Macmillan. Holdaway, S. and Wandsnider, L. (eds) 2008. Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited. Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, Houston, S. D. and Inomata, T. 2009. The Classic Maya. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Isendahl, C. 2008. Applied agro-archaeological research in the Bolivian Yungas. SAA Archaeological Record 8(3), 21-7. Jennings, J. 2008. Catastrophe, revitalization and religious change on the Prehispanic north coast of Peru. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, 177-94. Kendall, A. 1997. Traditional technology emphasized in a model for Andean rural development. Journal of International Development 9, 739-52. Lauwerier, R. and Plug, I. (eds) 2004. The Future from the Past. Oxford, Oxbow Press. Liverani, M. 2009. Exploring collapse. Scienze dell’Antichità 15, 15-22. McAnany, P. A. and Yoffee, N. (eds) Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. McGuire, W. J., Griffiths, D., Hancock, P. L. and Stewart, I. (eds) 2000. The Archaeology of Geological Catastrophes. London, Geological Society Publishing House. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. 2010. Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference, Perth, Friday May 14th 1982. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/104936 retrieved 14 September 2010. Mellars, P. A. 1985. The ecological basis of social complexity in the Upper Paleolithic of southwestern France. In T. D. Price and J. A. Brown (eds), Complex Hunter-Gatherers, 271-98. New York, Academic Press. Meskell, L. 2005. Recognition, restitution and the potentials of postcolonial liberalism for South African heritage. South African Archaeological Bulletin 60, 72-8. Millar, C. I. and Brubaker, L. B. 2006. Climate change and palaeoecology: New contexts for restoration ecology. In

Alley, R. B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19, 213-26. Alley, R. B., Mayewski, P. A., Sowers, T., Stuiver, M. Taylor, K. C. and Clark, P. U. 1997. Holocene climatic instability: A prominent, widespread event 8200 yr ago. Geology 25, 483-6. Arthur, C. and Mitchell, P.J. 2010. The archaeology of the Metolong Dam, Lesotho: A preliminary assessment. Antiquity 84 http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/ mitchell325/ Bailey, G. N. 1983. Concepts of time in Quaternary prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology 12, 165-92. Balée, W. (ed.) 1998. Advances in Historical Ecology. New York, Columbia University Press. Balée, W. and Erickson, C. L. (eds) 2006. Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands. New York, Columbia University Press. Bawden, G. and Reycraft, R.M. 2000. Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response. Albuquerque, Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico. Beattie, P., Apland, B., Blake, E. E., Cosgrove, J.A., Gaunt, S., Greer, S., Mackie, A. P., Mackie, K. E., Straathof, D., Thorp, V. and Troffe, P. M. 2000. The Kwä-day Dän Ts’ínchi discovery from a glacier in British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 24, 129-47. Benedictow, O. J. 2004. The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History. Woodbridge, Boydell Press. Bintliff, J. (ed.) 1991. The Annales School and Archaeology. London, Leicester University Press. Braudel, F. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. London, Collins. Brayne, M. 2007. Climate change and a couple of needy clients. Therapy 18(1), 4-7. Bruhns, K. O. 1994. Ancient South America. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bruun, C. 2007. The Antonine plague and the ‘third century crisis’. In O. Hekster, G. de Klejn and D. Slootjes (eds), Crises and the Roman Empire: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop of the International Network Impact of Empire Nijmegen, June 24-26 2006, 201-18. Leiden, Brill. Conrad, G. and Demarest, A. 1984. Religion and Empire: The Dynamics of Aztec and Inca Expansionism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Crumley, C L. (ed.) 1994. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes. Santa Fe, School of American Research Press. Dawood, N. J. 1967. Ibn Khaldûn: The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London, Allen Lane. Fagan, B. 2001. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. New York, Basic Books.

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M. Palmer, D. Falk and J. Zedler (eds), Foundations of Restoration Ecology, 315-40. London, Island Press. Mitchell, P. J. 2008. Practising archaeology at a time of climatic catastrophe. Antiquity 82, 1093-1103. Ravillous, K. 2009. Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months. New Scientist 2734, 10. Richerson, P. J., Boyd, P. and Bettinger, R. L. 2002. Was agriculture impossible during the Pleistocene but mandatory during the Holocene? A climate change hypothesis. American Antiquity 66, 387-411. Rowland, M. J. 2010. Will the sky fall in? Global warming – an alternative view. Antiquity 84, 1163-71. Scarth, A. 2009. Vesuvius: A Biography. Harpenden, Terra Publishing. Shaw, I. (ed.) 2000. The Oxford Illustrated History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shultziner, D, Stevens, T., Stevens, M., Stewart, B., Hannagan, R. and Saltini-Semerari, G. 2010. The causes and scope of political egalitarianism during the Last Glacial: A multi-disciplinary perspective. Biology and Philosophy 25, 319-46. Soffer, O. 1985. Patterns of intensification as seen from the Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain. In T. D. Price and J. A. Brown (eds), Complex Hunter-Gatherers, 235-70. New York, Academic Press. Soffer, O. and Gamble, C. S. (eds) 1990. The World at 18 000 BP: Volume One High Latitudes. London, Unwin Hyman. Spindler, K. 1994. The Man in the Ice. London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Stahl, A. B. 1999. Perceiving variability in time and space: The evolutionary mapping of African societies. In S. K. McIntosh (ed.), Beyond Chiefdoms: Pathways to Complexity in Africa, 39-55. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Stahl, A. B. 2004. Political economic mosaics: Archaeology of the last two millennia in tropical sub-Saharan Africa. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, 145-72. Straus, L. G., Eriksen, B. V., Erlandson, J. M. and Yesner, D. R. (eds) 1996. Humans at the End of the Ice Age: The

Archaeology of the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition. New York, Plenum Press. Taleb, N. N. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. London, Random House. Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tainter, J. A. 2008. Collapse, sustainability, and the environment: How authors chose to fail or succeed. Reviews in Anthropology 37, 342-71. Tarlow, S. 1999. Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. Torrence, R. and Grattan, J. P. (eds) 2002. Natural Disasters and Cultural Change. London, Routledge. Turney, C., Chappell, J., Kershaw, P., Lynch, A., Manton, M., Nicholls, N., van Ommen, T. and Pitman, A. 2005. Report for Reconstructing Past Climates for Future Prediction: Integrating High-Resolution Palaeodata for Meaningful Prediction in the Australasian Region. Canberra, Australian Academy of Sciences. van Buren, M. 2001. The archaeology of El Niño events and other “natural” disasters. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8, 129-49. van de Noort, R. 2011. Conceptualising climate change Archaeology. Antiquity 85, 1039-48. Ward-Perkins, B. 2005. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Webster, D. 2002. The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse. London, Thames and Hudson. Wenninger, B., Alram-Stern, E., Bauer, E., Clare, L., Danzeglocke, U., Jöris, O., Kubatzki, C., Rollefson, G., Todorova, H. and van Andel, T. 2006. Climate forcing due to the 8200 cal yr BP event observed at Early Neolithic sites in the eastern Mediterranean. Quaternary Research 66, 401-20. Young, H. 1989. One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher. London, Macmillan.

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Chapter 3 Parables of Decline: Popular Fears and the Use of Crises in Aegean Archaeological Interpretation Stephen O’Brien University of Chester

Abstract: Crises of various forms have been utilised to explain the decline or transformation of past societies since archaeology was established as a discipline in the 19th century. While the interpretation of such events has developed beyond comparatively simplistic ‘prime mover’ models toward increasingly nuanced and holistic analyses, a common thread is manifest in the presence within these narratives of contemporary fears subsequently read back into the past. This implicit reflection of contemporary ideology perhaps reveals more about the society engaged in archaeological interpretation, than it does the society responsible for the archaeological record under study. Given the increasing importance which discussion of crisis and decline is taking on in both academic and non-academic circles, such a situation is problematic given the biases it introduces into interpretation. Utilising the historiography of archaeological interpretations of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean (c.1700-1050 BC), this paper will present a history of the use of crisis as archaeological explanation, and its relationship to then-contemporary social, political and economic fears. A recent rise in the utilisation of environmental crisis as an archaeological explanation of change is evident in the field of Aegean prehistory, and will be critically examined in the light of the influence of social fears on previous generations of scholars. This paper questions the manner in which particular types of crisis are used to construct narratives reaching across spatial and temporal boundaries, and considers whether more particularistic explanations might be of greater analytical value. Keywords: Aegean; prehistory; Minoan; Mycenaean; collapse

Introduction

contemporary political characteristics of archaeological research into the Maya, by examining the link between the use of crisis and decline in Aegean archaeological interpretation and modern fears of the same. In most cases demonstrable analogues appear unconscious, an example of the general zeitgeist which implicitly affects archaeological researchers. As Matthew Johnson (1999, 167) has said, ‘Before the practising archaeologist goes to work, he or she reads the morning papers, worries about all the wars in the world and imminent economic recession.’ In a contemporary context in which war, economic recession, and other apparent threats feature prominently in the popular consciousness, the subsequent visibility of these themes in archaeological research might be considered inevitable. As will be seen, this phenomenon is one which can be traced across the history of archaeological research in the Aegean.

In a perceptive paper entitled ‘The Sea Peoples, The Victorians, and Us: Modern Social Ideology and Changing Archaeological Interpretations of the Late Bronze Age Collapse’ (1998), Neil Silberman noted that archaeological and historical interpretations of the Sea Peoples, a group described in the documentary records of a number of eastern Mediterranean societies c.1200 BC, had clearly been influenced by the contemporary concerns of their authors. Thus the destructive invading barbarians of the 19th and early 20th centuries became the dynamic entrepreneurs of the early 1990s (Silberman 1998, 2702). During the completion of a doctoral thesis concerning warfare and society in the Late Bronze Age Aegean, the author found himself confronted with two long-standing issues in Aegean prehistory: the end of most palatial centres on Crete in the LM IB period (c.1600-1500 BC), and the end of all palatial centres in the Aegean during the LH IIIB/IIIC transition (c.1200 BC). In attempting to account for these developments without simply reflecting contemporary concerns, it becomes apparent that many of those explanations previously put forward can be linked to the fears of then-contemporary society.

Voices Prophesying War: Early Archaeology in the Aegean and Great Power Rivalry The birth of an archaeology of the Late Bronze Age Aegean can be considered to have taken place in the last three decades of the 19th century, with the pioneering work of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and on Ithaca between 1870 and 1890, and of Arthur Evans at Knossos on Crete from 1900 onwards. Both identified the

This paper therefore expands upon the work of Silberman, and that of Richard Wilk (1985), who examined the

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end of the societies upon which their research focused in crises caused by foreign invasion. Schliemann attributed the destruction of the palace at Mycenae to an invasion of Dorians from the north (1878, 343-4). Similarly, Duncan Mackenzie (1904) and Evans (1909) suggested that violent action by people from mainland Greece could account for the destructions they saw in the archaeological record of Crete.

217-8). Boyd Dawkins’ 1874 proposal that more culturally advanced peoples pushed aside less developed ones (Trigger 2006, 214) furthered the identification of change in the archaeological record as a product of invasion-linked crises. Under such conditions, as Silberman (1998, 271) has noted, the narratives of invasion produced by archaeological interpreters closely mirror those of ‘invasion literature’, emerging as they did from a similar social and intellectual milieu. The similarity is particularly strong with regards to Evans’ interpretation of the ‘Mycenaeanisation’ of Knossos. Evans’ vision of a matriarchal, monarchic Knossian state possessing overwhelming naval superiority has been seen as an idealised vision of the British Empire of his own day (Hamilakis 2006, 147-9). Early ideas expressed by Evans (1909), and by his colleague Mackenzie (1904), of a society invaded from the mainland therefore seem to directly mirror British fears of German industrial, naval and colonial challenges to their supremacy; these concerns became particularly prevalent in Britain after 1889, and match closely the period of Evans’ archaeological work on Crete.

The prominence afforded to invasion in archaeological narrative has a number of sources. Schliemann’s belief that the Homeric poems represented historical truth naturally predisposed him towards a worldview of war and invasion, while Classical accounts of the Dorians, such as those of Herodotus (1.56.3) and Thucydides (1.12), must have proved equally influential. The close association between archaeology and Classical history in this period also resulted in a model of Classical Antiquity in which the examples provided by Germanic and Celtic invasions served as a guide for other eras. Similarly, the work of the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (1896), which envisaged a wave of migration beginning in the Balkans which resulted in a series of conquests and displacements reaching to the borders of Egypt, was originally published in 1873.

The fears of invasion which haunted the popular, and archaeological, imagination eventually proved to be tragic, self-fulfilling prophecies, first in the advent of the 1914-8 war, and again in the period of international crisis leading up to a second general conflagration in 1939-45. These fears, and the ongoing prominence of culture history in archaeological thought, ensured the continued eminence of invasion theories in Aegean archaeology (Meyer 1928; Pendlebury 1939). Evans rejected his initial idea of invasion in his publication of the Knossos excavations (Evans 1935b, 371), but suggested the accession of a new, more warlike, dynasty of Knossian priest-kings (Evans 1935a, 884-8), and in doing so perhaps reflected inter-war political turmoil in the run-up to the Second World War. Theories of invasion have retained a presence in Aegean archaeological discourse to the present day (Desborough 1964; Sandars 1964; Vermeule 1964; Drews 1993; Bouzek 1994; Driessen and Macdonald 1997), although not without critique (Snodgrass 1971 [2000]). The period of the Cold War, introducing, as it did, a different range of popular fears, resulted in the parallel introduction of new types of crisis into the narratives of Aegean prehistoric decline.

As Silberman (1998, 270) has remarked, the titling of Maspero’s work as ‘The Struggle of the Nations’ is telling. There were more contemporaneous fears of invasion than those of antiquity for archaeologists of the period to draw upon. The victory of a Prussian-led confederation of German states over France, the greatest European military power of the day, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, and the subsequent founding of the German Second Reich, ushered in a new period of international rivalry. The fear of invasion in Europe during this period can be seen in the fashion for ‘invasion literature’: fictional stories of invasion by a foreign power usually set in the near future. The model for a majority of such works was George Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’ (Chesney 1871), a cautionary tale of British defeat by Germany published in direct response to the Franco-Prussian War. More than 60 such novels were published in Britain in the period between 1870 and 1914 (Eby 1987, 11), while similar stories were produced in the same period by French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian and Italian authors (Clarke 1966, 32). Ignatius Clarke describes the origin and premise of such literature thusly: ‘The sudden emergence of tales about the future, which were based on Darwinism and on the idea of progress, followed on the war of 1870; and in that war of two great nations had demonstrated the fact of technological progress in a savage struggle to survive.’

‘When You Hear the Sound of the Air Attack Warning…’: Cold War Concerns The immediate post-war period, which ushered in the beginning of the Cold War and attendant fears of nuclear war, might be expected to have had an immediate impact upon the use of crises in Aegean archaeological interpretation. This, however, is not the case, and Bruce Trigger (2006, 386-7) has noted that, in the United States, the threat of nuclear war failed to prevent the period 194565 from being one of optimism and self-confidence for the middle classes. A similar interpretation can be put forward for the United Kingdom, given the ideology of the ‘New Elizabethans’ following the coronation of Elizabeth II in

Similar features can be found in the archaeology and anthropology of the period. A culture-historical archaeological paradigm eschewed ideas of cultural change via autonomous internal development: diffusion and migration became preferred explanations for change in the archaeological record, so that large-scale migration appeared to be the norm in the human past (Trigger 2006,

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1953, which played its part in inhibiting the development of new crisis-narratives for the decline and disappearance of palatial societies in the Aegean.

1974). Archaeologically, however, the theory exhibited significant flaws. No archaeobotanical changes could be attributed with certainty to climatic change (Wright 1968, 126), while Oliver Dickinson (1974) highlighted a continuity of population in Carpenter’s theoretical drought-zones, an absence of archaeological evidence for any expected influx of refugees to Attica, and the lack of any indication of drought or crop failure in the Linear B texts from the palace at Pylos in Messenia. Nonetheless, the notion of a climatological and environmental explanation for the end of the Mycenaean palaces was now present, and Vincent Desborough, who had previously adhered to an invasion hypothesis (1964) and who continued to do so, was willing to consider severe drought, at least as a possibility (1972, 22).

During the 1960s, however, this mood of confidence was eroded by what Trigger (2006, 410) describes as: ‘A succession of deepening economic crises that were exacerbated by repeated failures of foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. These events produced a marked decline of faith in the benefits to be derived from technological development. This uncertainty in turn spawned a proliferation of middle-class protest movements. Although these movements consistently avoided addressing directly the crucial economic and political problems of American society, they profoundly altered social values and influenced the social sciences.’

As the 1970s progressed, factors other than drought, yet still grounded in contemporary fears, began to be deployed. Philip Betancourt (1976) offers no primary cause for the end of the Mycenaean palatial system, instead concentrating on those factors which prevented recovery from whatever setback had affected the palaces. He points to the economic structure of the Mycenaean palaces being insufficiently robust to meet the challenge of disruption; an over-reliance of the agricultural economy on high-yield crops such as grain ultimately proving critical, following population expansion during LH IIIB. Simultaneously, the over-centralised nature of palatial bureaucracy discouraged self-sufficiency at the local level, with a resulting absence of infrastructure to allow adequate recovery at those levels. These factors would exacerbate an economic depression caused by some other setback, and eventually lead to collapse (Betancourt 1976, 42-5). J. S. Hutchinson (1977), similarly, saw economics as a determining factor, with an expansion of population resulting in the cultivation of marginal areas which became rapidly exhausted. In this model, improved agricultural methods would prove fundamental, but in their absence the depleted resource-base would deprive the palaces of those export goods essential to their survival, whilst an under-nourished populace would demonstrate increased susceptibility to epidemic disease (Hutchinson 1977, 12-8).

This changed mood, and its effects, can be detected in the publications of ‘Silent Spring’ (Carson 1962), which called attention to the chemical pollution of the environment through the use of pesticides, in ‘The Population Bomb’ (Ehrlich 1968), which predicted the starvation of hundreds of millions of people during the 1970s and 1980s as a result of population growth outstripping available resources, and in ‘The Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972), which pointed to the exponential growth of variables such as global population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion causing collapse in the 21st century as they outstripped the ability of technological development to increase resource availability. Such concepts could not help but be influential upon reconstructions of crisis and decline in the past. Within Aegean archaeology, this new mood is detectable first in the publication of Rhys Carpenter’s ‘Discontinuity in Greek Civilization’ (Carpenter 1966), in which the author rules out the involvement of an invading group in the end of the Mycenaean palaces, proposing instead that the end of the palatial system was the result of a climatic shift toward an orthographic pattern (Carpenter 1966, 39 and 63), in which rainfall would occur on the westwardfacing slopes of high ground, but not on land beyond the high ground. Carpenter’s reconstruction of this pattern in Greece holds that southern Messenia, Laconia and the Argolid would be deprived of rain, as would lowland Crete. Areas with high ground such as Kephallonia, Chios, Ikaria, Samos, and highland Crete would receive rain, as would Attica due to the channelling effect of the Gulf of Corinth upon westerly winds. Carpenter concludes that this climatological shift brought persistent drought and famine to Mycenaean Greece, with the palatial capacity for the storage of foodstuffs leading to their destruction by a desperate populace (Carpenter 1966, 64-70). The theory received some support in the form of an article stating that a climatic shift of the type envisaged by Carpenter was plausible for Greece given the existence of a similar pattern in the 1954-5 Greek drought (Bryson, Lamb and Donley

Such ‘econocentric’ explanations are perhaps a reflection of the economic problems characteristic of the western world during much of the 1970s. Betancourt’s theory, additionally, invokes contemporaneous critiques of the state as both overcentralised and bureaucratic. Betancourt and Hutchinson, additionally, seem influenced, however indirectly, by ‘The Population Bomb’ (Ehrlich 1968) and ‘The Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al. 1972) with their concerns of a rising population and the depletion of natural resources. Since Betancourt and Hutchinson published their papers, however, the Mycenaean economy has been identified as far less centralised than previously proposed (Halstead 1992a; 1992b). Archaeological evidence for epidemic disease is also absent from the Aegean in the late Bronze Age, despite recent re-statements of the idea (Walløe 1999). As noted with regards to the possibility of severe LBA drought,

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the kind of agricultural crisis envisaged in these theories appears inconsistent with information gleaned from extant Linear B archival material.

During the 1980s the matter of societal collapse became a concern of processual archaeology, which saw it as a problem requiring general explanation. Colin Renfrew (1979) made an initial effort in the application of the mathematical concept of Catastrophe Theory to archaeological data. According to this theoretical model, small changes in one or more sub-systems of a society can cause large, sudden changes to the overall system. In Renfrew’s evolutionary paradigm, ‘the well-known cases of systems collapse entail a catastrophic switch from early state society to segmentary society without stopping at the intermediate level of centrality, the chiefdom, on the way’ (Renfrew 1979, 504). The concept of such ‘systems collapse’ was further elaborated by Renfrew (1987, 133-7), but was given its most influential form by Joseph Tainter’s ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ (Tainter 1988), which makes use of the Minoan and Mycenaean palatial systems as examples of its overarching theory of ‘declining marginal returns’. Deriving, like the Catastrophe Theory employed by Renfrew, from General Systems Theory, the concept of declining marginal returns sees rising complexity in the growth of interlinked social subsystems. This growth brings benefits in areas such as storage and distribution, information processing and public works, but carries a cost in terms of energy requirements. Tainter (1988, 119-22) notes that:

Those theories formulated during the Cold War which sought to explain the end of the palatial system of Bronze Age Crete can be argued to reflect the greatest fear of the period: nuclear explosion. While such a fear might normally have difficulty manifesting itself in the study of prehistory, the Aegean provides the eruption of the volcano on the Cycladic island of Thera as a conduit for discussion of the consequences of vast explosive power. The connection between volcanic activity and the destructions seen on Bronze Age Crete was initially made prior to the Second World War (Schoo 1937; Marinatos 1939), with Spyridon Marinatos identifying tsunamis and earthquakes associated with the eruption as the cause of destructions at both coastal and inland sites on Crete, and therein precipitating a gradual decline (Marinatos 1939, 432-6). Subsequent research, however, has shown that the settlement of Akrotiri on Thera, which was buried by the eruption, contained LM IA pottery in its destruction layers, while the destruction layers of Cretan sites contained LM IB pottery; this gives a chronological gap between the two phenomena of some 50-100 years (Manning and Sewell 2002, 275), too long a period for the volcano to be the agent of a destruction in the short or medium term. Those doubting the extent of this chronological gap, or placing the eruption in a different part of the Bronze Age, were able to ascribe the Cretan destruction to the volcanic effects of earthquakes, tsunamis, and falling ash (Pomerance 1970; Höckmann 1974; Kleinmann 1974; Luce 1976; Platon 1984). These effects may, to some extent, be said to replicate those of a nuclear attack.1

‘At some point in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problemsolving strategy yields a declining marginal return... Declining resources and rising marginal costs sap economic strength, so that services to the population cannot be sustained. As unrest grows among producers, increased resources from a dwindling supply must be allocated to legitimization and/or control. The economic sustaining base becomes weakened, and its members either actively or passively reduce their support for the polity. Reserve resources to meet unexpected stress surges are consumed for operating expenses. Ultimately, the society either disintegrates as localized entities break away, or is so weakened that it is toppled militarily, often with very little resistance. In either case, socio-political organization is reduced to the level that it can be sustained by local resources.’

The general acceptance of this chronological gap, however, resulted in the need to find causality in the longer-term if the eruption were still to be considered terminal to palatial society on Crete. The climatological effects of large volcanic eruptions began to be considered in the mid-1970s (Schneider and Mass 1975), and out of this research came the theory of the ‘volcanic winter’, in which the ejection of volcanic material into the atmosphere could result in severe short-term periods of cooling over large areas of the world (Rampino, Self and Stothers 1988). This work was duly employed in order to understand the effects of the Theran eruption on the Aegean (Manning 1992). Once again, the fear of global nuclear catastrophe during the 1970s and 1980s would seem to have influenced the construction and reproduction of these models: the concept of ‘volcanic winter’ gaining theoretical acceptance roughly contemporaneously with that of the ‘nuclear winter’ as theorised from research into the climatic effects of a major nuclear conflict (Turco et al. 1983).

In accordance with its processual background, the theory of declining marginal returns is fundamentally ahistoric, and seeks to provide a general theory capable of explaining multiple instances of societal collapse. The role of specific events is circumstantial or merely representative of symptoms of a collapse which is ultimately internal in nature. Tainter’s scepticism towards the role of unique events is illustrated by his assertion that ‘The Cretans of ca. 1500 BC most likely stopped to watch the eruption of Thera, made whatever preparations were called for, and when it was all over went about their business’ (Tainter 1988, 54). While the role of the Theran eruption as an immediate or long-term destructive agent acting on the Cretan palaces is

The direct connection of the Late Bronze Age Thera eruption with the end of the Neopalatial palaces did not end with the Cold War (e.g. Antonopoulos 1992), but such explanations appear to have declined in number since the end of the 1980s. 1

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questionable, this is surely to under-estimate the broader significance of the event: Sturt Manning and David Sewell (2002), while dismissing any real causal link between Thera and the Cretan destructions, note that ‘The impact of the eruption may have weakened the status quo…and formed an element in the structuration, background and mythology of the society’ (Manning and Sewell 2002, 281). Tainter offers no specific example of the applicability of declining marginal returns to Late Bronze Age Crete.

economic prosperity during much of the 1990s, the pessimism of the 1970s, in which western capitalist society was often seen as doomed by nuclear war or the deleterious effects of capitalism, seemed far distant.2 The end of the nuclear threat may partly explain the unfavourable reception of Jan Driessen and Colin MacDonald’s ‘The Troubled Island: Minoan Crete Before and After the Santorini Eruption’ (Driessen and Macdonald 1997). This work proposed that the effects of tsunami, ash-fall and potential climatic irregularities generated by the LM IA eruption of Thera, resulted in social instability during LM IB, causing the destruction of most palatial sites and culminating in the arrival of Mycenaeans and the ‘Mycenaeanised’ Crete of the LM II-III period. The theory has received stiff opposition (Warren 2001; Manning and Sewell 2002), not least due to the fact that those societal reactions to historical disaster utilised by Driessen and MacDonald to reinforce the interpretation can be seen to have occurred within a post-event window of no more than a few years, rather than after the demonstrably much longer period between events in the archaeological record (Manning and Sewell 2002, 275). Other archaeological interpretations consider systems collapse (Marinatos 1993, 221), seismic activity (Warren 1991), or other forms of human agency (Hamilakis 2002, 184; Nowicki 2000, 38-9) as mechanisms for the LM IB destructions.3

The end of the Mycenaean palaces is, however, explained with reference to a model of declining marginal returns with Tainter (1988, 204) stating that: ‘It is possible that the Mycenaeans, a cluster of peerpolities, engaged in the same kind of competitive spiral that characterised other peer-polity systems – later Greek city-states, ancient and medieval Italian city-states, post-Roman Europe, Warring States China, and the Maya. As among the Maya, the upwardly-driven costs of such a system, without any real benefits at the local level, would have induced declining marginal returns. Unlike China, where large territories and vast populations repaid conquest and unification, successful competition by any Mycenaean polity would yield little real return. The result was probably constant investment in defense, military administration, and petty warfare, with any single polity rarely experiencing a significant return on that investment.’

It was perhaps the atmosphere of post-Cold War triumphalism which prompted a re-assessment of the Sea Peoples. While Victorian and Edwardian visions of the past had cast them as barbarous, destructive invaders, Silberman (1998, 272) detects the presence of neoliberal economic theory in the characterisation of the palatial system as ‘a heavy hand holding down private enterprise and blocking entrepreneurial initiative’ and the Sea Peoples as ‘enterprising merchants and traders, exploiting new economic opportunities, new markets, and new sources of raw materials’ (Muhly 1992, 19). Similar ideas can be found in Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy’s (1996) description of an over-centralised, overspecialised palatial system, and her (1998, 122) suggestion that ‘to many population groups of Mycenaean Greece the collapse of the palace system must also have had a lot of positive consequences…In the first place, the general population was rescued from suppression and from overload of taxes and of the labour obligations as registered by the Linear B documents’. Susan Sherratt (2001), also sees Mycenaean palatial collapse as fundamentally economic, with Cypriot merchants appropriating trade between the east and west

It is here that contemporary events may, once again, be considered to have influenced the interpretation of the past, despite the manifest ahistoricity of processual archaeological thought. Tainter’s work was published immediately prior to the implosion of the commandeconomies of the Eastern Block. The Soviet economy had entered crisis in the late 1970s, the effects of which became increasingly visible throughout the 1980s, not least in the Soviet inability to compete in the nuclear arms race with the United States. A similar, and perhaps even more explicit, late-Cold War parallel is drawn by Michael Wood (1985, 154) in his book, intended to accompany the popular BBC television series, ‘In Search of the Trojan War’, in the suggestion that military competition between Mycenaean states caused economic overstretch and eventual collapse. The end of the Cold War, in the period 1989-91, brought with it a significant shift in popular socio-economic or socio-political concerns, which are once again visible in the archaeological literature of the period.

Middleton’s (2012, 284) list of works holding the failure of an international eastern Mediterranean system responsible for a widespread Late Bronze Age collapse includes recent items such as Parkinson and Galaty (2009), Bachhuber and Roberts (2009), and van der Mieroop (2010), and suggests, perhaps, that fears regarding globalisation and the persistent effects of the financial crisis which began in 2008 are exerting an influence upon archaeological interpretation. 3 The argument by Tsonis et al. (2010) that climate change was a significant contributor to the end of palatial society on Crete represents the arrival of a significant post-Cold War fear to the explanation of that aspect of Aegean archaeology. 2

Market Failures: The Post-Cold War World The removal of the threat of large-scale nuclear war at the end of the 1980s significantly altered popular perceptions of contemporary risk. The same period additionally saw the removal of Marxist-Leninism as an influential political ideology in much of the world. Paralleled by a general

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Mediterranean, and import-substitution of formerly Aegean products occurring in Italy, Cyprus and the Levant, a situation which ‘bypassed them [the palaces] entirely or subverted their surrounding populations into the (probably willing) belief that they could do better without them’ (Sherratt 2001, 237-8).4

military forces of modern states. As such, the confrontation of non-state and state peoples in the Bronze Age pictured by Drews might be said to have its closest parallels in the failure of the United States to defeat irregular forces in Vietnam between 1965 and 1975 and with the failure of the Soviet Union to defeat irregular forces in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989; the latter conflict ending shortly prior to the publication of Drews’ work.

A more traditional, yet subtly altered, view of the Sea Peoples is provided by Robert Drews (1993). This work posits that the non-state peoples of the eastern Mediterranean c.1200 BC developed a new style of fighting which utilised light throwing javelins and new sword-types such as the central European Naue II variety. Fighting on foot, large bands of fighters equipped in this manner were able to overwhelm the chariot-archer based armies of the eastern Mediterranean palatial states, since the light javelin was an effective anti-chariot weapon which enabled the killing of horses and immobilisation of the vehicle (Drews 1993, 209-11). In the Aegean, Drews suggests, the non-state peoples involved would be ‘North Greek-speakers’ who had served as mercenaries in the palatial armies of southern Greece (Drews 1993, 216-7 and 21-22), and in doing so he implicitly invokes the concept of an archaeologically invisible invasion as put forward by Nancy Sandars (1983).

Drews’ revival of invasion theory was something of an outlier. The wane of Cold War fears allowed a new set of concerns – albeit ones which had been mooted previously – to come into their own. During the 1990s and 2000s environmental awareness in the western world increased dramatically. The environmental concerns of previous decades were still considered relevant, as demonstrated by the publication of ‘The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update’ (Meadows et al. 2004), and by the increasing concern regarding anthropogenic climate change during the first decade of the 21st century. Archaeological research, and particularly so that presented to the public, has reflected these concerns, as witnessed by the bestseller-status attained by the natural scientist Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’ (Diamond 2005). Diamond’s work sought to utilise the impact of human interaction with the environment to explain the collapse of a number of past societies, with collapse understood as a drastic decrease in human population size or social complexity over a wide area for an extended period (Diamond 2005, 3).

The difficulties of Drews’ theory have been competently analysed elsewhere (Littauer and Crouwel 1996; Dickinson 1999), but may be summarised here as an extreme under-estimation of the use of infantry in Bronze Age palatial armies, since archaeological evidence suggests that innovations in weaponry took place in the palatial heartlands rather than in outlying areas, and a proposed emphasis on the use of chariot-archers in the Aegean despite the general unsuitability of regional topography for chariotry of this type and the fact that only a single representation of a chariot being used in such a way exists in the corpus of Aegean art of the period.

The Aegean palatial system is not amongst Diamond’s major examples,5 but a similar perspective can be found in the work of the sociologist Sing C. Chew (2001; 2005; 2007). Chew adds an environmental perspective to world-systems analysis, arguing that human history is punctuated by ‘Dark Ages’ of 500-600 years which are characterised not only by economic and social crises, but also by environmental and climatological change caused by anthropogenic ecological disruption. Chew’s ‘Dark Ages’ are, therefore, presented as periods in which the natural environment is restored to balance (Chew 2005, 52-5). Applying this to the Late Bronze Age of the Aegean, Chew sees the Cretan and mainland palaces as collapsing due to the environmental damage they engendered. The palaces of Crete are said to have caused environmental stress through agricultural production and animal husbandry; a pressure which, combined with the effects of the Thera volcanic eruption, increasing aridity in the south Aegean climate, and economic competition from the Hittites and Kassites, led to collapse (Chew 2005, 65). A similar argument is put forward for the end of the Mycenaean palaces, with deforestation in Messenia and the Argolid postulated as a cause of erosion, alluvial deposition and flooding which became endemic during the crisis period of c.1200 BC (Chew 2007, 83). Following the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces, the

While Drews’ theory may appear as simply a reformulation of what Silberman (1998, 271) calls the ‘technologically precocious barbarian devastation’, there are clear differences between Drews’ model and those of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most significant is the fact that the invaders in Drews’ version are not technologically superior to their palatial adversaries, but rather technologically inferior: Drews (1993, 181 and n. 32) quotes E. Norman Gardiner (1907, 257) on the javelin as being ‘essentially the weapon of less highly civilized peoples. It is a weapon of the chase, a weapon of the common people, but it plays little part in the heavily equipped citizen armies of Greece and Rome’. The theory, therefore, contrasts the low-tech invaders’ javelins against the high-tech chariots of the palatial militaries (pace the description of the chariot as the ‘stealth bomber of the Bronze Age’ by Driessen (1999, 14)). A similar dichotomy will be immediately familiar to contemporary readers in the relationship that exists between 20th and 21st century insurgents and the conventional

Mention is made in passing of the possibility that the end of the Mycenaean centres, and those of other eastern Mediterranean societies, were related to invasions by ‘Sea Peoples’ (Diamond 2005, 14). 5

Later work by Sherratt (2003, 53-4) makes explicit the analogy with the contemporary world. 4

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landscape gradually recovered, with society following by c.700 BC (Chew 2007, 98). However, archaeological evidence from the Greek mainland argues against such a conclusion, given that soil erosion does not appear to have been a feature of the southern Argolid or the Argive plain during the ‘Dark Age’ (van Andel, Zangger and Demitrack 1990, 382-5).6 Moreover, Mycenaean palatial society encompassed a far larger area than that represented by the modern limits of Messenia and the Argolid, and the effects of an environmental crisis are not apparent in the palatial Linear B texts.

the highly expensive rearguard action being fought by the automotive and energy industries. Rather, it is to say that while archaeology may have useful contributions to make in terms of modern human responses (McAnany and Yoffee 2010, 12), the Aegean experience shows that archaeological data are not always unambiguous enough to allow for direct analogy (see also Middleton (2012, 258). Archaeologists can never fully escape the social and historical contexts in which our works are embedded, but we must strive to ensure that our interpretations of the sometimes radical changes seen in the archaeological record do more than act as simplistic parables of decline.

As regards the second primary strand of environmental causality for the end of palatial society, that of climatological change as originally raised by Carpenter in 1966, recent analyses (Shrimpton 1987; Moody 2005; Rohling et al. 2009) have concluded that while there may well have been a significant drought during the late Mycenaean period, the duration, extent, precise date, and impact of the event are unclear, making its use as a total explanation for palatial collapse inadvisable in the absence of further evidence.

Acknowledgements My thanks are due to Subhadra Das and David Smith for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Responsibility for any remaining errors lies solely with the author. Bibliography

Conclusion

Antonopoulos, J. 1992. The Great Minoan Eruption of Thera Volcano and the Ensuing Tsunami in the Greek Archipelago. Natural Hazards 5, 153-68. Bachhuber, C. and Roberts, R. G. (eds) 2009. Forces of Transformation: The End of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean. Themes from the Ancient Near East BANEA Publication Series 1. Oxford, Oxbow Books. Betancourt, P. P. 1976. The End of the Greek Bronze Age. Antiquity 50, 40-7. Bloedow, E. F. 1995. Human and Environmental Interaction in the Emergence and Decline of Mycenaean State and Society. In R. Laffineur and W.-D. Niemeier (eds), POLITEIA: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze Age. Aegaeum 12, 639-48. Liège, Université de Liège. Bouzek, J. 1994. Bronze Age Greece and the Balkans: A Review of the Present Evidence. Annual of the British School at Athens 89, 217-34. Bryson, R. A., Lamb, H. H. and Donley, D. L. 1974. Drought and the Decline of Mycenae. Antiquity 48, 4650. Carpenter, R. 1966. Discontinuity in Greek Civilization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Carson, R. 1962. Silent Spring. Boston MA, Houghton Mifflin. Chesney, G. T. 1871. The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. London, W. Blackwood and Sons. Chew, S. C. 2001. World Ecological Degredation: Accumulation, Urbanization and Deforestation, 3000 BC-AD 2000. Walnut Creek CA, Altamira Press. Chew, S. C. 2005. From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae: Dark Ages, Political-Economic Declines, and Environmental/Climactic Changes 2200 BC-700 BC. In C. Chase-Dunn and E. N. Anderson (eds), The Historical Evolution of World-Systems, 52-74. New York NY, Palgrave Macmillan. Chew, S. C. 2007. The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation. Lanham MD, Altamira Press.

Towards the conclusion of the paper which originally inspired this work, Silberman asks whether contemporary interpretations of the Sea Peoples ‘are not merely the fantasies of a world which is itself in the midst of dramatic economic transformation’ (Silberman 1998, 272). Can we, similarly, describe the various explanations put forward for the end of the Mycenaean and Minoan palaces as merely modern ‘fantasies’? The answer is no. While the explanations listed above for the end of palatial societies in the Aegean may have been less archaeologically convincing than their proponents realised, the societies which put them forward were not wholly unjustified in their fears. The Victorian and Edwardian states of Europe were faced with a military confrontation which eventually culminated in devastating full-scale war. Similarly the people of the 1970s and 1980s were faced with the very real prospect of a worldwide nuclear catastrophe, certain economic systems have entered crisis and collapsed, and conventional militaries have encountered difficulties in facing guerrilla forces. None of these fears were fantasy. It is at this juncture that the contemporary significance of analysing previous explanations for the end of Aegean palatial societies becomes apparent. The current debate over anthropogenic climate change is becoming increasingly important in the political agenda, and archaeology, with its great time-depth and global scale, presents a tempting tool for both sides. It is this political context which must make us wary of allowing contemporary fears to sculpt too closely our interpretations of the past. This is not to suggest that anthropogenic climate change is in any sense a modern fantasy, as the author is under no illusions as to the reality of either the anthropogenic origin of climate change, or of See also Bloedow (1995), critiquing Wells, Runnels and Zangger (1993). 6

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Schneider, S. H. and Mass, C. 1975. Volcanic Dust, Sunspots, and Temperature Trends. Science 190, 741-6. Schoo, J. 1937. Vulkanische und seismische Aktivität des ägäischen Meeresbeckens im Spiegel der griechischen Mythologie. Mnemosyne 3 (4), 257-94. Sherratt, E. S. 2001. Potemkin Palaces and Route-Based Economies. In S. Voutsaki and J. T. Killen (eds), Economy and Politics in the Mycenaean Palace States, 214-38. Cambridge, Cambridge Philological Society. Sherratt, E. S. 2003. The Mediterranean Economy: ‘Globalisation’ at the End of the Second millennium BCE. In W. G. Dever and S. Gitin (eds), Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina, 37-62. Winona Lake IN, Eisenbrauns. Shrimpton, G. 1987. Regional Drought and the Economic Decline of Mycenae. Echos du Monde Classique/ Classical Views 31, 137-77. Silberman, N. A. 1998. The Sea Peoples, The Victorians, and Us: Modern Social Ideology and Changing Archaeological Interpretations of the Late Bronze Age Collapse. In S. Gitin, A. Mazar and E. Stern (eds), Mediterranean Peoples in Transition: Thirteenth to early Tenth Centuries BCE, 268-75. Jerusalem, Israel Exploration Society. Snodgrass, A. M. 1971 [2000]. The Dark Age of Greece: An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC (Reprint ed.). Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Tainter, J. A. 1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Trigger, B. G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought (2nd ed.). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tsonis, A. A., Swanson, K. L., Sugihara, G. and Tsonis, P. A. 2010. Climate Change and the Demise of Minoan Civilization. Climate of the Past 6, 525-30. Turco, R. P., Toon, O. B., Ackerman, T. P., Pollack, J. B. and Sagan, C. 1983. Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions. Science 222, 1283-92. van Andel, T. H., Zangger, E. and Demitrack, A. 1990. Land Use and Soil Erosion in Prehistoric and Historical Greece. Journal of Field Archaeology 17 (4), 379-96. van der Mieroop, M. 2010. The Eastern Mediterranean in the Age of Ramesses II. Malden MA, Blackwell. Vermeule, E. T. 1964. Greece in the Bronze Age. Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press. Walløe, L. 1999. Was the Disruption of the Mycenaean World caused by Repeated Epidemics of Bubonic Plague? Opuscula Atheniensia 24, 121-7. Warren, P. M. 1991. The Minoan Civilisation of Crete and the Volcano of Thera. Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum 4, 29-39. Warren, P. M. 2001. Review of ‘The Troubled Island: Minoan Crete before and after the Santorini eruption’. American Journal of Archaeology 105 (1), 115-8. Wells, B., Runnels, C. N. and Zangger, E. 1993. In the Shadow of Mycenae. Archaeology 46 (1), 54-8.

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Chapter 4 ‘Five Feet High and Rising’: Environmental Crises and the Art of Prehistoric Scandinavia Courtney Nimura University of Reading

Abstract: The Mesolithic through to the Bronze Age in Scandinavia was a period of erratic, sometimes extreme, environmental change. Prehistoric Scandinavians inhabited the coasts and experienced post-glacial isostatic, eustatic and climatic fluctuations. We are now more capable of scientifically reconstructing these fluctuations, and these contemporary data have sparked a new interest in reviewing existing research within more informed environmental contexts. Archaeological examples from this region such as rock carvings and ornamented portable artefacts have often been discussed in terms of cosmology and religion, and many depict elements of the environment. Environmental changes would have had an effect on how prehistoric Scandinavians perceived their surroundings and subsequently influenced their ‘worldviews’, social practices, rituals, and central to all of these their ‘art’. This paper presents research on the distribution and geographical contexts of a group of ornamented artefacts from Mesolithic Denmark. That research is the foundation of an exploration of the relationship between prehistoric Scandinavians and the critical changes in their environment, and its possible effects on the social action of the production and consumption of art. Understanding the complex ways in which humans are known to perceive their surroundings requires a methodology reaching beyond empirical material studies and involving disciplines outside archaeology. This paper explores the use of such a methodology. Keywords: Mesolithic; Bronze Age; Scandinavia; environmental change; portable art; rock art

Present-day situations do not always have a palpable relevance to prehistoric archaeology. In the last couple of decades however, an international awareness and acknowledgement of climate change has intensified interest in disaster and crisis archaeology, visibly marked by the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1989. The current ‘global warming’ situation has given prehistoric archaeologists first-hand experience of disastrous environmental events, societal responses to these events, and the short and longer-term cultural, emotional and psychological effects that they may cause (Mitchell 2008; Rowland 2010). Inhabitants of northwest Europe at the beginning of the post-glacial Holocene experienced similar episodic environmental crises as a result of transgressions and regressions of the Fennoscandian glacier.

Mesolithic inhabitants might have perceived and processed their environment. Secondly, it will present theories from archaeology and anthropology regarding the many ways art functions in non-state societies. It will then introduce in more detail the environment, society and maritime nature of Mesolithic Denmark. The next point to address is whether prehistoric art can be used to see responses to environmental crises, and whether archaeological evidence can support propositions for how prehistoric peoples were affected by environmental changes. To investigate this, we can look at the empirical data (distribution and geographical / geological contexts) of a group of ornamented artefacts from Mesolithic Denmark and a few examples of rock art and portable bronze artefacts from Bronze Age Scandinavia. This paper proposes that the production and consumption of art was a social action largely characterized by the relationship between prehistoric Scandinavians and the critical changes in their environment.

This paper explores how environmental changes in the Mesolithic of southern Scandinavia would have had an effect on how the inhabitants perceived their surroundings; that this would have subsequently affected their religious, mythological or cosmological beliefs, their social practices and rituals, and, central to all of these, their art. It will focus on a few propositions surrounding ‘art’ from Mesolithic Denmark. Firstly, it will examine possible social implications of environmental ‘catastrophes’. Though changes in cultural material, economy and settlement patterns can be more empirically assessed, connecting human responses to environmental crises requires a separate methodology. This paper will therefore present theory from cognitive and landscape studies that can inform how

Negotiating the environment: change and the human experience From the Mesolithic through to the Bronze Age, environmental crises took numerous forms. Climate change sparked floral and faunal changes. Sea-level fluctuations mutated lakes to seas and flooded masses of land. Land equilibrium movements caused southern coastlines to withdraw inland. One can imagine that Mesolithic peoples required a way culturally and socially to process these changes. Certainly others have recognised that

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one of the roles of culture is to process the experience of environmental change. Martin Bell and Michael J. C. Walker (2005, 141) believe that ‘…one of the many roles of the package of activities which we label culture is the spatial and temporal dissemination, collection and organization of information concerning people/environment interaction’. This investigation will examine to what extent we can postulate the ways in which Mesolithic peoples might have interpreted their environments and how they might have processed environmental changes. It is necessary to consider other disciplines in order to create a more informed and holistic picture of Mesolithic peoples’ relationship with their environment and better understand how this might have affected the production and consumption of their cultural material, specifically their art. This is a twofold process. First, explorations of the prehistoric mind are essential to understand how they perceived, processed and understood environmental changes. Archaeologists have looked to psychology, cognitive studies and neuroscience to deal with this. Second, the role of art in prehistoric societies must be explored, which is aided by theory from disciplines such as sociology, ethnography and anthropology. Both are extensive research topics, and only selected theories will be introduced.

(Solso, 2003, 76). In the past, some scholars who subscribed to an evolutionary model of development assumed a set of universal and pre-social cognitive abilities and functions. This focus on the strictly biological aspect of cognition may be misleading. Advances in neuroscience have shown that, yes, there are certain universal basic mental capacities that we most likely share with Mesolithic peoples. Yet as the art historian Ernst Gombrich asserts (1977, 275), ‘While our common human physiology no doubt results in our having universal, generalized responses to certain stimuli, perception is an active and cognitive process in which cultural factors play a dominant role. Perceptions are cultural phenomena’. If we look to theories from psychology, perhaps we can begin to see how environmental changes might have been perceived and processed by prehistoric peoples. Evolutionary psychologists generally see the mind as ‘an evolved mechanism, which has been constructed and adjusted in response to the selective pressures faced by our species during its evolutionary history’ (Mithen 1996, 42). They also believe, however, that there are certain abilities of the mind that are already in place at birth: the mind is made up of multiple ‘content-rich mental modules’ sometimes compared with a Swiss army knife: a set of tools that serve different purposes and different abilities contained in one unit (Mithen 1996, 44). Developmental psychologists generally believe that as children we are armed with intuitions regarding the world around us (often discussed in the ‘theory of mind’). Distinctions are made during conceptual development about things that one encounters in their environment, be it people or objects (Boyer 1999). The creation of these distinctions then defines certain principles, which ‘guide inferences about these different kinds of things’ (Boyer 1999, 207; Boyer 1998). These distinctions lead to the creation of categories called ‘ontological domains’ within which defined principles ‘deliver intuitive explanations for observed states’ and also create ‘expectations about future states of affairs’ (Boyer 1999, 207). Ontological domains lead to the assumption of relevant underlying processes, ‘skeletal principles’, which are applicable to each domain (Boyer 1999, 208; Gelman 1990). If we combine the ideas of the developmental and evolutionary psychologists, then the mind has innate intuitions and multiple modules, but also learns from outside pressures and can adapt itself.

Perception, cognition and processing environments: cognitive and landscape archaeology An understanding of the prehistoric mind is essential to any discussion of prehistoric cultural practices. It is essential as it informs hypotheses of how Mesolithic peoples perceived environmental changes and the consequences that arose from them on an individual and social level, over an extended period of time (see Ingold 2000; Tilley and Bennett 2004, 2008). It is now common practice for archaeologists to travel outside the boundaries of their disciplines and utilise theories from other disciplines to better understand cultural practices (Coolidge and Winn 2009; Helskog 2001; Mellars et al. 2007; Mellars and Stringer 1989; Mithen 1996, 1998, 2005, 2007; Renfrew et al. 2009). Archaeologists often use anthropology, sociology and ethnography (Boyer 1999; Bradley 2002; Chippindale and Taçon 1998; Tilley 1996). Others use cognitive studies (Mithen 1996, 1998; Renfrew et al. 2009) and landscape studies (Bradley 1991; 2000, 2009; Ingold 1993; 2000; Leary 2009, 2011; Tilley 1994) to provide insight into how humans relate to the their environments.

The anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993, 2000) prefers to use ecological psychology to understand the relationship of human and environment. He does not agree with the cognitive scientists who suggest a pre-existent mental design that gives meaning to the environment through the processes of perception and cognition. By Ingold’s definition, perception, cognition and action are indivisible; they are three steps rolled into one (see Sturt 2006 for an alternative perspective). Interactions with the natural world do not begin with the mind, as we are inseparable from that environment, we dwell within it. Ingold uses ecological psychology to question the terms perception and cognition.

Cognitive studies view the way in which the prehistoric mind interpreted its surroundings as, among other things, a question of perception and cognition. These are the ‘principal components’ of information processing, and each one influences the other (Solso 2003, 80). Perception describes the process of our senses becoming aware of an outside object or occurrence. Cognition defines the multivariate central functions of the brain, the processes that convert sensual observations such as perception into relevant knowledge (Frith 2009). The cognitive background of a person influences and gives meaning to experience

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

Art in non-state societies: methods of interpretation from archaeology and anthropology

Ecological psychology suggests that ‘perceptual activity exists not in the operation of the mind upon the bodily data of sense, but in the intentional movement of the whole being (indissolubly body and mind) in its environment’ (Ingold 2000, 166). Sense data is already meaningful if the person perceiving it is treated ‘not as a passive recipient of stimuli but as an active agent who purposively seeks out information that would specify the meaningful properties of his or her environment’ (Ingold 2000, 164).

Scholars from various disciplines have postulated a number of theories about the function of art in non-state societies. To succinctly cite a famous example from the early days of anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) observed the kula exchange amongst the Trobrianders off the coast of New Guinea. In this scenario art objects function as gifts associated with economic or familial exchanges. Art objects can represent symbolic aspects of social relationships in these exchanges, as Marcel Mauss (1966 [1922]) demonstrates in his account of Polynesian material culture in The Gift. Manufactured cultural objects are often ornamented to mark property or to distinguish one social group from another, as in territorial marking. Some scholars prefer to discuss aesthetics (e.g. Coote 1992; Coote and Shelton 1992; Gosden 2001; Morphy 1992), while others think of art more symbolically, privileging its social meaning and value to its aesthetic value (Gell 1992, 1996, 1998; Svašek 2007). Or if we turn to Alfred Gell (1996, 1998), the function of art is fundamentally a social action.

In later prehistory ‘human capacity for creative thinking was pushed to its limits, as it is becoming increasingly apparent that some of the environmental changes were catastrophic in nature’ (Mithen 1998, 196). Jim Leary (2009) suggests that understanding human-environment relations will enable a broader understanding of the impact of environmental changes on a population. For Leary, sea-level changes should not be seen as a challenge to ‘overcome’. Rather these changes and their effects are ‘indivisible’ from the landscape as a whole, which is also indivisible from those who dwell in it (Leary 2009, 228). Leary agrees environmental changes would have affected inhabitants, but argues that these ‘effects’ may not have been perceived as a one-sided imposition by nature on humans, but rather as an ‘integral part of their world’ (Leary 2009, 235).

From the 1970s anthropologists began to accord art objects a more privileged role in society, viewing them ‘as integral to the processes of reproducing social relations and of developing affective relations with the world’ (Morphy and Perkins 2006, 10). Gell championed this view. Though his method is controversial and has been criticised (see Morphy 2009), his alternative approach is relevant here. For Gell, art objects exist to exert agency between members of a society, whom he calls human agents. These art objects are not mere signs with meanings (as words are in language). Gell takes a decidedly anti-linguistic, anti-structuralist stance and rejects the idea of art as a method of symbolic communication. He posits a new relational system comprised of actions enacted by people and objects, primarily that of agency. The artefacts are ‘secondary agents’ through which ‘primary agents’ (humans) ‘distribute their agency in the causal milieu [the setting in which artefacts cause an affect] and thus render their agency effective’ (Gell 1998, 20). Art is created within the matrix of social relations. It is an active part of society. Gell argued that by giving art objects agency, they could have an effect (or rather cause an effect), on other members of society. This paper hypothesises that by giving art objects agency they could also have or cause an effect on the environment.

Evidence regarding the way we process information in our brains points to a constant interaction of present experience and past memories (Solso 2003). Cultural and social memory not only plays an important role as it gives meaning to individual experience, but also supports a longer-term understanding that environmental changes had consequences. Mesolithic peoples would have been under pressure to make new knowledge and understanding from the perceptions of their changing environments, and would also be aware of their own historicity. As Richard Bradley (2002, 12, 53) argues, although ‘Such arguments are difficult to substantiate…it is true that the whole of human culture depends on the workings of memory… Prehistoric lives would always have been conducted according to an awareness of history… That awareness would have extended from the origins and use of artefacts acquired in daily life…to the wider landscapes in which [people] lived’. In the Doggerland region, for example, inhabitants would have seen ‘their landscape change – sometimes within a single day, sometimes within their lifetime, sometimes only when they recalled what parents and grandparents had told them about lagoons and marshes now permanently drowned by the sea’ (Mithen 2003, 151). The concept of cultural memory, a history in prehistory, supports the postulation that these communities would have understood the consequences of environmental changes from the individual memories of more rapid environmental change and a cultural memory of slower change. This paper now looks at how art functions in non-state societies, with a view to determining how environmental changes could have affected the production and consumption of images.

In many studies from anthropology and archaeology objects considered as art are seen to be central to the ritual actions involved with religion, mythology and cosmology. Scandinavian prehistoric archaeologists especially have often seen a strong connection between portable and parietal art and larger cosmological or religious sets of beliefs. If we adopt Gell’s theory that art objects have the power to cause an effect in the causal milieu, they may therefore play an integral role in a society’s engagement with a larger worldview (religion, mythology, cosmology). In the examples from the archaeology of rock art that follow, these

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worldviews often involve the environment. Though rock art is inherently different from portable art, in Scandinavian archaeology the interpretive theories and methods from rock art studies can be translated and utilised in this study due to their strikingly similar imagery (Bahn 2002; Bradley 1997a-b, 2001, 2009; Bradley et al. 2002; Clegg 2001; Gelling and Davidson 1969; Goldhahn 2008; Goldhahn et al. in press; Helskog 1999, 2001; Kaul 1998; Larsson 2003/4; Whittle 2000). Elements of the environment such as the landscape or seascape, water, naturally occurring fauna, and the sun appear regularly on both portable art and in rock carvings. Because of this similarity of imagery, theory from rock art is often applied to portable art.

point is then used as a framework within which to interpret the meanings of the individual carvings. This again combines the study of individual rock panels / motifs and larger landscape contexts. Helskog’s approach embodies three concepts presented in this paper: that art production is an integral part of ritual activity, that these rituals refer to a larger worldview (be it a cosmology, mythology or religion), and that these worldviews are often connected to the environment. Similarly, Flemming Kaul’s (1998) tripartite religious system is derived from his observations of the portable bronze artefacts found in Denmark. He argues that in this system the sun is drawn across the sky by horses and chariots in the daytime, and then at night, it disappears under the sea, transported by ships or eels. Hans Bolin (2000, 167, 171) sees the placement of rock art in proximity to water as ‘a central element in the ancient mythological belief system’. Here people did not conform to strict ideas of settlement and boundaries but rather more ‘intimately in terms of specific locales and sites near different waterways’ (Bolin 2000, 171). These archaeologists define religious systems that involve elements of the environment emphasising the movement of sun and the importance of the shore and the sea. They see these systems reflected in the art objects.

Bradley (1997a-b, 2001, 2009; Bradley et al. 2002) is one who incorporates ethnographic examples to gain insight into the meanings of prehistoric art (see Ballard et al. 2003; Chippindale and Taçon 1998). In the paper ‘Death by Water…’ he presents the rock art of the Bohuslän region as integral to the prehistoric landscape, in which various components of the archaeological record can be used to interpret the carvings in a larger geographical context (Bradley 1991, 1997a, 2000, 2001; Bradley et al. 2002). Here Bradley analyses the boat and human footprint motifs appearing in the rock art. Instead of seeing the boat images simply as boat representations, he wonders if the composition of the boats on the rock panel is meant to ‘convey the idea of water itself’ (Bradley 1997a, 321-2). The boats are pictured in lines that mimic the horizon as if they were on the surface of the sea. Thus the carvings of boats can be said to recreate the sea in a new ‘mythological landscape’ (Bradley 1997a, 321-2). This multi-scalar method of looking at both the landscape (from micro-landscape to regional distribution patterns) and the individual images simultaneously is a method that leads the scholar back to the central importance of the environment in Scandinavian prehistoric art.

Returning to Gell, he views ‘art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it’ (1998, 6-7; my emphasis). If portable or parietal objects were given agency to cause an effect, Lars Larsson (2003/4) attempts to explain a possible outcome of this effect. He theorizes that the changing environment would have altered the way in which Mesolithic peoples viewed and understood their world. Simply put, the environment was changing; Mesolithic people had no way to explain these changes and therefore turned towards cosmological explanations. He assumes that the inclination to explain these changes is an instinctive human action that would have been performed by Mesolithic peoples. Robert Solso (2003, 75) concurs that ‘Homo sapiens…use a complex brain to attempt to understand cosmic problems’. Larsson believes environmental changes were drastic enough to have been identified in the landscape and must have had a psychologically jarring effect. In a way that recalls Christer Westerdahl’s (1992) concept of the cognitive landscape of the shoreline, Larsson (2003/4, 223) suggests that ‘being forced to change one’s physical map from one generation to the next must have had consequences for the mental map’. He investigates both the distribution of rock art sites (guided by Helskog’s 1999 article) and grave / cemetery sites and observes that the graves, rock art sites and even decorated objects were deliberately placed near the water. Larsson (2003/4, 223) wonders if these sites were a ‘means to try to achieve balance in a changing world’. In this proposition, the deliberate placement of art objects might have been the intentional use of ‘art agency’ to create an effect in the causal milieu (see also Ling and Cornell 2010; McNiven 2004). In a recent article Vincent

Knut Helskog’s (1999) seminal article ‘The Shore Connection…’ explores patterns in the geographical locations of the rock carvings in Norway. These carvings are found predominantly at the shoreline. Helskog suggests that this placement is a conscious decision determined by a religious belief that the shoreline is the point of connection between three worlds: the upper world in the sky, the middle world on the earth and the lower world underwater. He explains that ‘Spirits in other dimensions are ‘contacted’ by people in order to gain control over animals, resources, diseases, people, spirits, life…Could, then, the shore…represent the appropriate place for rituals that connected people with the worlds of the spirits?’ (Helskog 1999, 79). This cosmological concept of the three worlds is drawn from Arctic aboriginal populations and is seen in other circumpolar ethnographic examples (though their connection to prehistory is wholly unknown) (Helskog 1999, 75). Helskog sees the rock art images as inseparable from the landscape they inhabit: a view shared by others (see Bradley 1997a, 318, 2000; Olsrud 2001, 251). His theory that the shore acts as a communication

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Vieira (2010) proposes a similar interpretation model that connects sea-level change, rock art and mythology. He looks specifically at the swan motif that appears in rock carvings on the eastern side of Lake Onega, northwest Russia. Vieira subscribes to a similar viewpoint as Helskog, noting that the rock carvings are deliberately placed near the shore, where the land, water and sky converge. Evidence in this region shows that rising lake levels (in association with climatic cooling) might have submerged ‘early Onega sites’ (Vieira 2010, 259). The overwhelming occurrence of the swan motif might have been a ‘cognitive attempt to resolve external challenges within the context of an existing mythological framework…the swan may have been perceived as the most powerful agent for the intended reversal or control of such [environmental] challenges (or as a solution for their effects)’ (Vieira 2010, 259-60). His theory connects directly to Larsson (2003/4) and Gell (1996, 1998).

picture of the three cultural stages of the Danish Mesolithic and their corresponding geological periods. Pre Boreal –Boreal / Atlantic transition: Maglemose culture c. 9500 – 6400 BC (Jensen 2006) The Mesolithic of Denmark commenced at the beginning of the Holocene when the majority of the Fennoscandian ice sheet was in its final stages of natural retreat c. 14.5 ka. Although the Holocene environment would seem mild in comparison to its Pleistocene forerunner, it was not the case. The beginning of the Holocene was marked by a sharp rise in sea level due to an abundance of water freed from melting ice sheets and the beginnings of isostatic uplift and climate changes, all of which drastically altered the landscape of the Mesolithic inhabitants. The ‘Main Postglacial Transgression’ around the Baltic region from c. 9 ka BP marked the beginning of Denmark’s mutation from connected landmass to a sea of islands (Bell and Walker 2005, 121). Although the approximately 40mm / yr increase after 7.5 ka BC ‘…sound(s) small, the implications of such figures for Mesolithic times were extraordinary: coastal catastrophe…’ (Mithen 2003, 150). By 9.3 ka BC on the eastern side of Denmark, coastal flooding had forced the inhabitants around the Baltic States to relocate their homes (Mithen 2003). ‘Doggerland’, which currently forms the floor of the North Sea connecting Denmark to England, would be forever drowned. Now highly researched, it is understood to have once been one of the ‘richest’ inhabited areas in Europe (see Flemming 2004; Gaffney et al. 2007).

According to Gell (1996, 1998), art objects have agency and are active ‘members’ of societies. They are seen to be central to prehistoric cosmologies, mythologies or religious systems in archaeological and anthropological theories. Many of these worldviews often involve the environment. Therefore, understanding the environmental changes that occurred in northwest Europe is important in the study of the relationship between these worldviews and the art objects. Before we begin to scrutinize the objects in question we should situate ourselves in the environment of Mesolithic southern Scandinavia. A geo-archaeological picture of the Danish Mesolithic environment, c. 9000 – 4000 BC (Jensen 2006)

The de-glaciation did not occur at an even pace. The relationship of sea-level change, glacier melting, isostatic lifting and temperature change was wholly intertwined: as the temperatures continued to rise, the ice sheet continued to shrink, freeing the land below from its weight. The shrinking glacier also affected the character of inland water, as seen in the history of the formation of the Baltic Sea. Evidence shows that the Baltic ice lake drained as quickly as a matter of months and no longer than a few years, creating a ‘vast new expanse of shoreline’ as the water level fell nearly 25 metres (Björck 1995; Björck and Digerfeldt 1989; Mithen 2003, 155). The new shoreline meant new rich and usable land, but by c. 10.6 cal. ka BP isostatic movement surpassed eustatic rise and formed the Anclyus Lake (Eronen 1983 as cited by Roberts 1998, 90). The final flooding of the Anclyus coincided with the flooding of the Danish straits, bringing the land closer to its present character ‘ca 8400 Cal. yr BP (ca 7.7 ka BP)’ (Roberts 1998, 90).

The Mesolithic of Denmark was a period of environmental change. Different geographic regions underwent varying metamorphoses. Scholars write of situations ranging from catastrophic tsunamis that drowned entire settlements to minor sea level fluctuations that possibly went unnoticed (Bailey and Parkington 1988a-b; Bell and Walker 2005; Björck 1995; Björck and Digerfeldt 1989; Mithen 2003; Roberts 1998). As Steven Mithen (2003, 151) describes, ‘The experience of those who dwelt along the coastlines of Europe varied with time and place. For some, the environmental changes were so gradual as to go unnoticed: minute year-by-year shifts in diet, technology and knowledge – a subtle unconscious moulding of lifestyle’. For others, the changes would have required conscious and decisive action. Because archaeological and sedimentation records present longer spans of time, it is difficult to discern individual environmental disasters (flash floods, tsunamis etc.) in this time period. However, Francesco Menotti (2002) insists that slower, long-term crises can have just as much effect on a society as consequences of drastic and sudden ones. There are infinite aspects of the Mesolithic environment that could be explored here, but this paper focuses on Denmark and those factors that affected the coastal environment: isostatic and eustatic movements and climate changes. The following section is a macro-scale

Influxes of cold freshwater created ocean imbalances and climate changes throughout the Maglemose cultural period, which subsequently altered local flora and fauna. Roberts (1998, 100) describes the beginning of the Holocene as ‘two turbulent millennia of vegetation change’ in which ‘tree species moved in to occupy suitable vacant land with much the same self-interested zeal as the miners of the ‘49 Gold Rush…After, European phytogeography

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looked fundamentally different’. With new forestry came new varieties of fauna. Horse and elk fled the disappearing tundra and were replaced with entirely new species, making animal resources less accessible as ‘more dispersed and less visible’ woodland creatures inhabited the dense forests (Roberts 1998, 111).

147; Christensen 2001). In Scandinavia, evidence points to renewed glacier activity both ‘from ca 6 ka BP’ and ‘from ca 3 ka BP’ (Bell and Walker 2005, 113), which caused ‘a distinct cold phase between 6 and 4 kyr BP over Fennoscandia’ (Moros 2004, 2120). Mesolithic Denmark: a maritime cultural landscape

Atlantic: Kongemose culture c. 6800 – 5400 BC (Jensen 2006)

It is difficult to think of Denmark as anything other than a maritime landscape. Yet Mesolithic Denmark was once thought of as a place where ‘primitive’ peoples hunted and gathered to sustain their wandering lifestyles. They were not thought of as particularly advanced, technologically or artistically. Evidence from the last few decades, however, especially from the field of underwater archaeology, has altered this view entirely (e.g. Andersen 1984a-b, 1985, 1987a-b, 1990; Bailey and Spikins 2008; Bevan and Moore 2003; Coles et al. 1999; Fischer 1995; Flemming 2004; Hvass and Storgaard 1993; Larsson 1990; Larsson et al. 2003; Pedersen et al. 1997; Price 1983, 1985; Vermeersch and van Peer 1990). These publications paint a new picture of the economic and social lives of the Danish Mesolithic peoples. They were more than hunter-gatherers. They were expert fishermen who made semi-permanent fish traps, who carved log boats, which they probably used for eel trapping and fishing, and who created intricately ornamented art objects. Evidence for their exploitation of the marine environment is seen in numerous site reports and is now a generally accepted theory (e.g. Andersen 1995; Enghoff 1993; Enghoff et al. 2007; Fischer 2004; Tauber 1981). The results of the Storebælt excavations support Anders Fischer’s ‘fishing site model’. He postulates that settlements were situated on coastal sites where stationary fishing traps could exist, such as ‘river mouths and narrow parts of fjords, on headlands and islands’ (Fischer 1997, 65; 1993). Discoveries from underwater excavations such as Møllegabet (Grøn 2003; Grøn and Skaarup 1991; Skaarup and Grøn 2004) and Tybrind Vig (Andersen 1984a-b, 1985, 1987a-b) continue to enhance our understanding of maritime Mesolithic culture. Recent interpretations have been aided by new investigations into the environmental contexts of the region (such as sea level and coastline reconstructions) both within archaeology and in the sciences (Andersen et al. 1990; Bailey and Parkington 1988a-b; Bell and Walker 2005; Burroughs 2005; Christensen 1993, 1995; Christensen et al. 1997; Fischer 1997; Hede 2003; MacKay et al. 2005; Mathiessen 1997; Mithen 2003; Petersen 1981; Roberts 1998; Schilling 1997; Shennan and Andrews 2000; Strand Petersen 1985).

As Roberts (1998, 88) states, ‘Although interglacial conditions became established soon after 11,500 Cal. yr BP, it would be quite wrong to imagine that the climates, ecosystems and landforms of the early Holocene were identical to those of the present day or that they have remained static since that time’. At the divide between the Maglemose and Kongemose periods a new 28 m rise in sea level began (Christensen 1995 gives the date 6400 cal. BC). It would take only 600 years for this transgression to create a coastline almost as we know it today. At a steady rate, this would mean an average rise of 5m / 100 years or c. 5cm / yr. Though it was never this even, it is compelling to think that if a Mesolithic human lived in the right 35 years, they could have seen the sea rise almost two metres in their lifetime. Especially in areas with ‘shallow offshore gradients’ the tides would have inundated quite quickly ‘at a rate that must have been noticeable from one year to the next’ (Roberts 1998, 90). During the Kongemose between 7 and 4 ka BP, pollen analyses show that the annual mean temperature was 2–2.5 °C warmer than today (Antonsson 2006; Enghoff et al. 2007, 168). These warmer periods would have aided the melting ice, supporting a rise in sea level of great consequence to the Danish inhabitants. Even ‘…small shifts of sea-level, changes in strength or direction of ocean currents, and changes in sea temperature or salinity equally influence the nature of the shore and its available resources’ (Bailey and Parkington 1988b, 3). This changed landscape significantly altered subsistence patterns. As Christensen (1995, 15) describes it, ‘the ‘Fishing Stone Age’ had begun’. Late Atlantic: Ertebølle culture c. 5400 – 3900 BC (Jensen 2006) The coastline by the time of the Ertebølle period was fairly stable in comparison to the previous period. After 6 ka BP the sea level might have only risen a few metres with tides not much different than those today (Roberts 1998, 789). However, isobase maps estimating isostatic uplift suggest that over 700m of uplift took place in the Baltic region during the Holocene, in Denmark occurring from 0 to 100m (Bell and Walker 2005, 118). The Scandinavian ice sheet did not just ‘retreat’ at the end of the glacial period but had short periods of renewed activity. Minor fluctuations still occurred: a ‘marine shell gytjja’ shows a relative rise in sea level approximately ‘4800 BC (ca 5950 14c BP)’, which was followed by a ‘relative sea-level fall around 4000 BC (ca 5250 14c BP)’ (BC dates from Hede 2003,

This paper has considered the extent of the environmental changes in the Mesolithic. It has used Gell’s theory of art production as social action, archaeological perspectives on rock carvings, cosmology, mythology and religion to consider how art might have functioned. The next section will investigate how the distribution and ornamentation of a group of portable art objects might be related to changes in the natural environment.

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

The Mesolithic portable art of Denmark / southern Scandinavia: data collection and methodology

of an individual object within 3km of the Mesolithic coastline. Those objects from excavated sites that could be located within a specific cultural layer are obviously more accurately dated, but they are in a minority. It should also be noted that the chronology Plonka uses extends from the Pre-Boreal – late Atlantic. In order to maintain a database congruent with Plonka’s, his methodology of categorization and chronology is employed. Again, this reconstruction gives only a general idea of the distribution of the ornamented artefacts, but it does show how portable art objects were deposited in connection with watery environments, which would have been subject to the more extreme environmental fluctuations.

Tomasz Plonka’s catalogue of early Mesolithic / late Mesolithic ornamented objects in The Portable Art of Mesolithic Europe (2003) was the key data source used for this project. The 371 Danish portable art finds were extracted from this catalogue and entered into ArcGIS. As already explained, Denmark’s coastline was altered by eustatic processes in the Mesolithic. Therefore, the archaeological find spots of the objects are currently in very different geographical settings. In order to address sea level changes in this project, it was imperative to relocate them in their Mesolithic setting. This process resulted in 166 objects being located on the coast and 189 objects located inland (yet almost all the landlocked sites were situated near freshwater sources). The task of geographically locating the sites proves difficult as the Mesolithic coastline of Denmark changed continuously, and the dating of certain sites and objects can be indeterminate or have long chronological spans. The information that currently exists to create an environmental / geological / geographical picture of Mesolithic Denmark is advanced, but not to the extent that one can create a map of, say, the coastline every hundred years. Therefore, the following maps claim only to give a general idea of the distribution of the ornamented artefacts from Danish coastal sites. The location of the sites was determined in the following manner.

The ornamented objects Given the discussion in this paper a fundamental question is: is it possible to see a reflection of environmental change in the ornamented objects? The ornamentations on a selection of objects located in close proximity to a Mesolithic watery environment are presented below. Pre-Boreal –Boreal / Atlantic transition: Maglemose culture (Figure 1, Table 1) In this period new fauna populated the reforested lands of Denmark, replacing the horse and elk that departed with the arctic tundra. Mesolithic peoples were eating nuts, berries and fishing more than their predecessors. There are sixteen objects located to the Mesolithic coast during this time (Figure 1, Table 1). Because the Maglemose culture favoured ‘bone objects and pointed antler tools’ to ornament, it is notable that almost all of the objects found on the coast or at underwater sites in this period are amber pendants or ‘plastic’ / non utilitarian objects (Larsson 1990, 286). Larsson (1990) has already suggested that this indicates ritual deposition or, at the very least, the special values attached to the pendants.

The Danish central register for cultural material Det Kulturhistoriske Centralregister is in an online database entitled Fund og Fortidsminder (Kulturarvsstyrelsen 2008). (Note: this database was updated in 2011 and the methodology used below was conducted with the previous version). Site name or archaeological journal number (acquired from site reports) can be used to query this online database. When the object is associated with a record, the database provides a wealth of information including Universal Transverse Mercator [UTM] coordinates. Those objects that could not be linked to a record in the database were plotted on the map as points based on their original parish location, any information in the original literary source or by place-name. The three projected Mesolithic coastline images of the Boreal – Boreal / Atlantic transition, the Atlantic and the late Atlantic were taken from various published sources. These images were then geo-referenced to a present day coastline in ArcGIS and points were added to the present day coastline. When the present day coastline is hidden, the points are left in their approximate location on the Mesolithic coast. A fuller statement of the evidence can be found elsewhere (Nimura 2008).

One such example is the amber pendant from Egemarke, whose markings are highly ornate and specific. It was most likely sewn onto an item of clothing as it contains multiple boreholes possibly caused by constant wear. The anthropomorphic pendant is in the shape of what is believed to be an elk head (or horse), with ‘modelled portions of neck, muzzle and a characteristic fold of skin under the jawbone’ (Plonka 2003, 60). Both sides of the object are engraved with columns of zigzag lines that run perpendicular to the animal head (see Plonka’s ornamentation numbers A14, A24). This elk figurine was found in a coastal environment in the northwest of Zealand, an area that experienced sea level changes. The elk pendant was created when the animal was departing from the changing lands. The Hjørring amber pendant contains a depiction of (possible) anthropomorphic figures. Plonka suggests that the upraised arms signify gestures alluding to a story either real or mythological in which case the geometric motifs then serve as elements in the story (Plonka 2003, 179). On the right side of the image, the upraised

Though some objects were discovered during excavations, often they represent loose finds and these artefacts cannot necessarily be assumed to have been ‘in use’ where they were found. For the underwater finds it is often difficult to know whether an object was dredged from what was once a settlement or washed ashore from what was already the sea. ‘Coastal’ finds were therefore defined by the discovery

29

Tough Times

Figure 1. Map of Denmark depicting present day coastline (grey indicates land) and Boreal – Boreal / Atlantic transition coastline c. 6-7000 BC (from Mathiessen 1997). Sites. 1: Blåvandshuk 2: Dageløkke 3: Egemarke 4: Fanø Vesterstrand 5: Guldager Mose 6: Guldager Mose 7: Lilleø 8: Limfjord 9: Norhølm 10: Oksby 11: Sønderho 12: Tårbæk 13: Vålse Vig 14: Vedersø Strand 15: Vesternæs 16: Hjørring

Table 1. Object types plotted on Figure 1. Object type Amber pendant

Amount 12

Site 1: Blåvandshuk 3: Egemarke 4: Fanø Vesterstrand 5: Guldager Mose 6: Guldager Mose 8: Limfjord 9: Norhølm 10: Oksby 11: Sønderho 14: Vedersø Strand 15: Vesternæs 16: Hjørring

Antler shaft

1

12: Tårbæk

Bone mattock-head

1

2: Dageløkke

Bone point

1

7: Lilleø

Stone knife

1

13: Vålse Vig

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

arms gesturing and the tilt of the body horizontally make the figures look as though they are swimming. Plonka (2003, 179) argues that there must have been a change in ideology following ‘the great fluctuation of the sea water levels’: a change that would continue throughout the Atlantic. As Plonka points out there is also an increasing frequency of representations of the watery environment at the turn of the Boreal and Atlantic, a possible reflection of this change in ideology.

activity between 6 and 4 kyr BP (Moros 2004, 2120). Isostatic shifts in the north persisted, though at a less rapid pace, and smaller sea level fluctuations continued throughout the Ertebølle culture. The coastal cultures of the Ertebølle period have been so well studied that they can be described as regionally and culturally different. Andersen defines different cultures on either side of the Storebælt by their material culture, from Zealand and ‘western JutlandFyn’, especially in their ‘preference for certain patterns and compositions in art’ (Andersen 1993, 67; 1981). The most examined and discussed ornamentation that occurs in this period is the so-called ‘sheaf of grain’ motif, the design of which recalls the earlier ‘net’ pattern (Andersen 1981, 53). The ‘sheaf of grain’ has been noted to appear at a time when Ertebølle cultures might have first been exposed to incoming farmers, and its adoption could reflect a change from Mesolithic fishing to Neolithic agriculture. If one supports the theory that farming was introduced from the mainland / present-day Germany, it is interesting that the ‘sheaf of grain’ motif does not occur east of the Storebælt, appearing mainly in Jutland and Fyn (Andersen 1981, 51). This also supports the idea that representations of subsistence (fish / fishing technologies / shellfish) and daily life are plausible interpretations of other ornamentations.

Atlantic: Kongemose – early Ertebølle cultures (Figure 2, Table 2) The group of objects found at Mesolithic coastal sites grows to 34 in the Atlantic / Early Atlantic period. The bone dagger from Flynderhage, dated to the early Ertebølle, is made of either elk or aurochs metatarsal. It is ornamented with a design reminiscent of the zigzag lines on the amber pendant from Egemarke presented above (Andersen 1998, 28). Flynderhage is located 120m southwest of the Norslund settlement (Andersen and Malmros 1966, 112). The settlement strata from Norslund were clearly ‘deposited in connection with a shore zone which has been subject to transgression’ (Andersen and Malmros 1966, 111). The ornamentations on the dagger from Flynderhage can be compared to those on an antler hammer from Vedbæk. The Vedbæk hammer has similar zigzag lines as those found on the pendant from Egemarke, and also a series of images of fishing that have been catalogued from various Ertebølle sites. The triangular joins of the wavy lines are filled in with hatched lines and give the impression of water, a fish trap or, as has been tentatively suggested, a fish (Mathiassen 1941, 130). Its ornate decoration suggests that it was not used for every day hammering, but possibly served as a ritual object such as a drumstick (Mathiassen 1941, 131).

Motifs could have been inspired by images and shapes seen by Mesolithic peoples such as on the bone point from Flynderhage which depicts a ‘partially worn leaf or fish (Andersen 1981, 53-4). Other ‘fish’ depictions are seen on the antler axes from Ølby Lyng (Figure 5) chemical works and Tybrind Vig (Figure 3) (Plonka 2003, 89). The axe from Ølby Lyng came from a stratum that links it to a period of marine inundation (Liversage 1967, 224-6). David Liversage sees the ornamentation as a flatfish (though Plonka deems it too generic to specify). Two log boats and three wooden ornamented and painted paddles (some of the only ornamented wooden objects from the Mesolithic) were found at the underwater site of Tybrind Vig off the western coast of Fyn. The antler axe from this same site has a depiction of a fish in the centre of a series of triangular shapes, possibly showing the fish caught in a trap in a similar style as the Ølby Lyng axe. Many of these objects substantiate what Plonka (2003, 183) suggests, that the ‘ornamentation[s] probably conveyed religious, symbolic and mythical ideas, connected in particular with the surrounding world’. Glørstad, Nakrem and Tørhaug (2004, 107) report a Mesolithic sculpture of a shell from Østfold, Norway and agree with Plonka when they state that this representation ‘fits smoothly into the theory that Mesolithic society took elements from nature and transformed them into cultural products’.

It is between the Maglemose and Kongemose cultures that the ‘dawn of the fishing age’ began (Christensen 1995, 15). The aforementioned objects came from settlements tentatively dated to the tail end of these great sea level changes. With each of the Littorina transgressions climate changes occurred and sea life changed in response to this: warmer or cooler waters encouraged the migration of some species and drove others away. In the late Mesolithic, the tendency towards the watery environment ‘is expressed in representations of fish and developed narrative compositions probably incorporating also geometrical images of fishing equipment’ such as fish traps and nets (Plonka 2003, 179). Andersen (1993) also interprets the more complicated geometric designs as fishnets and fishing devices that would have grown in usage at the turn from Boreal to Atlantic.

Conclusion

Late Atlantic: late Kongemose – Ertebølle cultures (Figures 3-5, Table 3)

This paper began by proposing that present day ‘global warming’ could provide a useful analogy to prehistoric archaeologists, as they attempt to imagine the impact of environmental change on the postglacial inhabitants of

The 116 objects in this group make it by far the largest. There were still environmental fluctuations in the late Atlantic, such as a distinct cold phase and renewed glacier

31

Tough Times

Figure 2. Map of Denmark depicting present day coastline (dashed line) and Atlantic coastline (bold line) c. 5000 BC (from Jensen 1988). Double circle symbol indicates more than one site. Sites. 17: Bognæs 18: Dragsholm, grave no 1 19: Erslev Kær / Ø. Jølby Kær 20: Fanø, Vesterstrand 21: Flynderhage, kitchen midden; 22: Lild Strand 23: Tangkrogen 24: Vallensbæk 25: Argus Bank 26: Blak II 27: Bognæs 28: Carstensminde 29: Copenhagen, Frihavn 30: Copenhagen, Winthers bodeanstalt 31: Fjordgård 32: Gislinge, Lammefjord 33: Hagested, Lammefjord 34: Hagested, Lammefjord 35: Hagested, Lammefjord 36: Havnsø 37: Kilde 38: Køge, vicinity 39: Køge Sønakke 40: Lejre Vig 41: Næssevang, Lammefjord 42: Sejlflod 43: Søholm 44: Søholm 45: Søholm 46: Søholm 47: Trønninge Enge 48: Værebro Ode 49: Vedbæk 50: Villingebæk Øst A

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

Table 2. Object types plotted on Figure 2. Object type Antler axe

Amount 8

Site 25: Argus Bank 28: Carstensminde 31: Fjordgård 33: Hagested, Lammefjord 34: Hagested, Lammefjord 35: Hagested, Lammefjord 40: Lejre Vig 41: Næssevang, Lammefjord

Antler shaft

6

19: Erslev Kær / Ø. Jølby Kær 27: Bognæs 32: Gislinge, Lammefjord 44: Søholm 45: Søholm 46: Søholm

Bone dagger

6

21: Flynderhage, kitchen midden 26: Blak II 30: Copenhagen, Winthers bodeanstalt 37: Kilde 39: Køge Sønakke 43: Søholm

Bone knife

4

17: Bognæs 18: Dragsholm, grave no 1 47: Trønninge Enge 48: Værebro Ode

Amber figurine

3

20: Fanø, Vesterstrand 22: Lild Strand 23: Tangkrogen

Amber pendant

2

24: Vallensbæk 42: Sejlflod

Antler hammer

2

38: Køge, vicinity 49: Vedbæk

Antler retouche

1

29: Copenhagen, Frihavn

Burin flint

1

50: Villingebæk Øst A

Unidentified bone object

1

36: Havnsø

northwest Europe. In a fitting story from Climate Changes in Prehistory, William Burroughs (2005, 57) recounts that

and place to imagine one could see a representation of the human relationship to the environment, the coasts of Mesolithic Denmark are ideal. To reiterate, Larsson (2003/4, 223) speculates that graves and rock art might have been an attempt to recreate balance in the environment, and so might the act of engraving, carving, drilling and eventually using and depositing these portable art pieces. By using Gell’s (1998, 20) explanation of the function of art in society, where art objects are a ‘system of action, intended to change the world’, the production and consumption of art could have been a social action largely characterized by a period of environmental crises in Scandinavia. This ritual act of art making is a complex weave of context, perception and expression, and might have been an important function of a people searching to redefine their relationship with their environment.

‘Even today changes in sea level raise powerful emotional reactions. On the southeast coast of England the chalk cliffs are seen as part of the country’s heritage. In 2000 a large chunk of the most spectacular part of these cliffs…fell into the sea. This event was seen as clear evidence of rising sea level and was greeted with a great sense of powerlessness and foreboding about the consequences of global warming.’ The environment played an important role in many aspects of prehistoric life, some of which have been presented here. Environmental changes would have influenced where Mesolithic peoples chose to settle and their methods of subsistence. But environmental changes might also have had other powerful effects, which could have created instability in Danish Mesolithic lives in multiple ways, such as inspiring a renegotiation of worldviews (see Tilley and Bennett 2004, 2008). And as H.H. Lamb (1995, 284) suggests, it is how these environmental changes are interpreted - what they are thought to portend - that often ‘influences human action’. If ever there were a time

Acknowledgements Professor Richard Bradley, University of Reading; Dr. Joe Flatman, Institute of Archaeology (IoA), University College London (UCL); Elizabeth Morrow. This paper is based on previous research conducted at the IoA at UCL. It was written during the author’s PhD studies at the University

33

Tough Times

Figure 3. Map of Denmark depicting present day coastline (black line) and late Atlantic coastline (grey line) c. 4500 BC (from Hellesen and Tuxen 1988). Double circle symbol indicates more than one site. Sites. 52: Ågård 59: Bogø Nor 62: Brovst, layer 4 63: Busemarke 75: Ertebølle 79: Fanø, Vesterstrand 86: Gudsø Vig 103: Hvide Sande 106: Kolding Fjord 107: Kolding Fjord 108: Kolding Fjord 109: Kolding Fjord 110: Kolding Fjord 111: Kolding Fjord 112: Kolding Fjord 123: Langø 125: Lerkenfeldt Å 141: Resen (near Skive) 142: Skærbæk (Gudsø Vig) 159: Tybrind Vig 160: Tybrind Vig 161: Tybrind Vig 162: Tybrind Vig 163: Tybrind Vig

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

Figure 4. Detail map of Jutland, Denmark depicting present day coastline (black line) and late Atlantic coastline (grey line) c. 4500 BC (from Hellesen and Tuxen 1988). Double circle symbol indicates more than one site. Sites. 60: Brabrand 61: Brabrand 65: Dyrholm I 66: Dyrholm I 67: Dyrholm I 68: Dyrholm I 69: Dyrholm I 70: Dyrholm I 71: Dyrholm I 72: Dyrholm I 73: Dyrholm I 74: Dyrholm II 76: Eskelund 77: Fannerup 78: Fannerup F, grave 81: Fladbro 83: Flynderhage, kitchen midden, upper part 84: Flynderhage, kitchen midden 85: Flynderhage, kitchen midden 87: Haldrup Strand 88: Hansted River 93: Hevringholm 94: Hjarnø 95: Holme 96: Horsens Fjord (havn) 97: Horsens Fjord 98: Horsens, ‘Loddentot’ 99: Horsens, ‘Loddentot’ 100: Horsens, ‘Loddentot’ 101: Horsø 102: Horsø 113: Kolind, layer I 114: Kolind, layer I 115: Kolind, layer I 116: Kolind, layer III 117: Kolindsund 118: Kolindsund 119: Kolindsund, ‘Nederst’ 129: Lystrup Enge 130: Mejlgård (Meilgaard) 134: Norslund, layer 3 135: Norslund, layer 3 140: Østerbjerg 143: Skellerup Enge 144: Snaptun 145: Snaptun 151: Stensballe Sund 152: Stensballe Sund 153: Stensballe Sund 165: Viby, Gåsemose

Figure 5. Detail map of Zealand, Denmark depicting present day coastline (black line) and late Atlantic coastline (grey line) c. 4500 BC (from Hellesen and Tuxen 1988). Double circle indicates more than one site. Sites. 51: Ådal 53: Bloksberg, level C 54: Bloksberg, level D 55: Bloksberg, level D 56: Bloksberg, level D 57: Bloksberg, level E 58: Bloksberg, level ? 64: Dybsø Fjord site 95 (Mellemste Sandhuk) 80: Fårevejle 82: Flintholm 89: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 90: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 91: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 92: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 104: Kalundborg 105: Klintesø (‘Klint’) 120: Korsør, Glasværk 121: Korsør, Glasværk 122: Korsør, Glasværk 124: Lejre 126: Lille Åmose 127: Lille Røttinge 128: Lyngebækgård 131: Nivå 132: Nivå 133: Nivå 136: Ølby Lyng, chemical works 137: Ølby Lyng 138: Ølby Lyng 139: Ølby Lyng 146: Søborg Sø 147: Søborg Sø 148: Søborg Sø 149: Sølager 150: Sølager, layer I 154: Strøby Egede, Engvangsvej 52, grave 155: Strøby Egede 156: Svinninge Vejle 157: Svinninge Vejle 158: Svinninge Vejle 164: Værebro Å 166: Ydernæs 6 (Fiskerhuset)

35

Tough Times

Table 3. Object types plotted on Figures 3-5. Object type

Amount

Antler axe

45

Site 51: Ådal 59: Bogø Nor 60: Brabrand 61: Brabrand 65: Dyrholm I 66: Dyrholm I 67: Dyrholm I 68: Dyrholm I 76: Eskelund 77: Fannerup 78: Fannerup F, grave 81: Fladbro 82: Flintholm 86: Gudsø Vig 89: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 93: Hevringhol. 97: Horsens Fjord 98: Horsens, ‘Loddentot’ 99: Horsens, ‘Loddentot’ 100: Horsens, ‘Loddentot 101: Horsø 106: Kolding Fjord 107: Kolding Fjord 108: Kolding Fjord 113: Kolind, layer 1 117: Kolindsund 118: Kolindsund 119: Kolindsund, ‘Nederst’ 123: Langø 125: Lerkenfeldt Å 142: Skærbæk (Gudsø Vig) 143: Skellerup Enge 159: Tybrind Vig 160: Tybrind Vig 151: Stensballe Sund 120: Korsør, Glasværk 124: Lejre 127: Lille Røttinge 131: Nivå 136: Ølby Lyng, chemical works 146: Søborg Sø 154: Strøby Egede, Engvangsvej 52, grave 155: Strøby Egede 156: Svinninge Vejle 164: Værebro Å

Antler shaft

17

87: Haldrup Strand 88: Hansted River 90: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 91: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 92: Helsingør, Bergmansdal 94: Hjarnø 102: Horsø 109: Kolding Fjord 110: Kolding Fjord 111: Kolding Fjord 114: Kolind, layer 1 121: Korsør, Glasværk 122: Korsør, Glasværk 140: Østerbjerg 144: Snaptun 145: Snaptun 166: Ydernæs 6 (Fiskerhuset)

Bone dagger

11

54: Bloksberg, level D 55: Bloksberg, level D 56: Bloksberg, level D 71: Dyrholm I 75: Ertebølle 115: Kolind, layer I 116: Kolind, layer III 132: Nivå 147: Søborg Sø 149: Sølager 150: Sølager, layer 1

Bone knife

8

63: Busemarke 64: Dybsø Fjord site 95 (Mellemste Sandhuk) 105: Klintesø (‘Klint’) 126: Lille Åmose

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Courtney Nimura: ‘Five Feet High and Rising’

Object type

Amount

Site 130: Mejlgård (Meilgaard) 134: Norslund, layer 3 165: Viby, Gåsemose 148: Søborg Sø

Amber pendant

5

79: Fanø, Vesterstrand 95: Holme 103: Hvide Sande 157: Svinninge Vejle 158: Svinninge Vejle

Bone point

4

53: Bloksberg, level C 70: Dyrholm I 83: Flynderhage, kitchen midden, upper part 135: Norslund, layer 3

Wood paddle

4

85: Flynderhage, kitchen midden 161: Tybrind Vig 162: Tybrind Vig 163: Tybrind Vig

Antler harpoon head

3

96: Horsens Fjord (havn) 129: Lystrup Enge 153: Stensballe Sund

Antler point

2

58: Bloksberg, level ? 138: Ølby Lyng

Flint core

2

128: Lyngebækgård 139: Ølby Lyng

Unidentified bone object

2

69: Dyrholm I 133: Nivå

Amber figurine

1

141: Resen (near Skive)

Antler chisel

1

152: Stensballe Sund

Antler haft

1

137: Ølby Lyng

Antler mattock

1

80: Fårevejle

Antler pick

1

104: Kalundborg

Bone harpoon head

1

57: Bloksberg, level E

Bone needle

1

62: Brovst, layer 4

Bone plate

1

74: Dyrholm II

Flint endscraper

1

52: Ågård

Stone net sinker

1

84: Flynderhage, kitchen midden

Unidentified antler object

1

72: Dyrholm I

Wood bow

1

112: Kolding Fjord

Wood leister prong

1

73: Dyrholm I

of Reading, generously funded by the Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and Annual Fund.

Andersen, S. H. 1987a. Tybrind Vig: A Submerged Ertebølle Settlement in Denmark. In J. M. Coles and A. J. Lawson (eds), European Wetlands in Prehistory, 253-95. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Andersen, S. H. 1987b. Mesolithic Dugouts and Paddles from Tybrind Vig. Acta Archaeologica 57, 87-106. Andersen, S. H. 1990. En rav-jyde. Oltidens Ansigt 3031, 197. Copenhagen, Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, Jutland Archaeological Society. Andersen, S. H. 1993. Mesolithic Coastal Settlement. In S. Hvass and B. Storgaard (eds), Digging into the Past: 25 Years of Archaeology in Denmark, 65-8. Copenhagen, Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, Jutland Archaeological Society.

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Chapter 5 Collapse, Climate Change and Conflict: A Profile of Crisis and Response in Late Andean Prehistory Lucas C. Kellett University of Maine at Farmington

Abstract: The Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400), or LIP, was a transformative time in central Andean prehistory, in which highland populations were faced with multiple cultural and environmental crises. These crises included the collapse of regional imperial power, the onset of major climate change, increasing economic stress and heightened levels of localized conflict across the region. In this paper I evaluate the cultural responses to these convergent crises by presenting recent survey and excavation data from the Andahuaylas region of southern Peru, the traditional homeland of the Chanka ethnic group. I argue that highland LIP populations responded to these crises in two principal ways: 1) the aggregation of local populations into high elevation (3500+ meters above sea level) hilltop settlements; and 2) the reorganization of subsistence to a high altitude agro-pastoralism. The shift to an integrated high altitude settlement and agro-pastoral subsistence strategy provided an effective risk reduction measure for the long-term survival and general stability of highland populations for nearly four centuries. Keywords: crisis; Andes; hilltop settlement; agro-pastoralism; Chanka; climate change

Introduction

Ortloff and Kolata 1993) and Moche (Chapdelaine 2000; Shimada et al. 1991) polities. A diverse set of modern, as well as archaeological and paleoclimatic data, confirm that natural disasters in the Andes occur at variable intensities and across a wide spectrum of spatial and temporal scales (Reycraft and Bawden 2000; Moseley 1997, 2000). Most well known are the catastrophic consequences of short term, but severe events such as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation, also known as “El Niño”) events along the Peruvian coast (e.g., Moore 1991; Reycraft 2000), as well as earthquakes, tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions (Moseley 1983, 2000). Longer-term environmental disasters consist of chronic periods of aridity and significant temperature fluctuations (Binford et al. 1997; Kolata 2000; Moseley 1997).

The study of crisis within Andean archaeology affords a unique opportunity through which to comprehend past human response to a multitude of interconnected political, economic and environmental stressors. The dynamic cultural developments of the central Andes, which span nearly 12,000 years, have been shaped by repeated cycles of crisis and cultural response. In fact, it is these alternating trends of political complexity and integration, framed by other periods of political decentralization and fragmentation, which have shaped the long-term cultural trajectories of the region (e.g., La Lone 2000; Marcus 1998; Moseley 1992; Stanish 2001; Figure 1). Central Andean prehistory has also been heavily impacted by the extremely rugged and geographically diverse environment of the region, which provided prehistoric populations an unparalleled environment to hunt and gather, as well as to conduct agriculture and camelid pastoralism (e.g., Brush 1976, 1977, 1982; Parsons et al. 2000; Winterhalder and Thomas 1978). Despite this fact, the central Andes was, and continues to be, an area plagued by a high degree of environmental uncertainty and economic risk (Dillehay and Kolata 2004; Kuznar 2001).

In the Andes, natural, as well as cultural, disasters played critical roles in the fall of numerous complex polities. Cultural downturns can be the result of a range of events or processes and can include invasion by (or warfare with) an enemy group, rebellion, a collapse of leadership, ethnic conflict, and transformations in the ideo-political order, among others. It should be re-emphasized that, in general, archaeologists have traditionally focused most attention on societal collapse and its particular causes (Tainter 1988; Yoffee and Cowgill 1988). In comparison, proportionally less attention has been devoted to understanding how surviving populations coped and responded in the decades and centuries following periods of crisis, although this trend is beginning to change (e.g., Bawden and Reycraft 2000; deMenocal 2001; McAnany and Yoffee 2009).

In recent decades, Andean archaeologists have paid considerable attention to the role of natural disaster in long-term Andean prehistory (Bawden and Reycraft 2000; Dillehay and Kolata 2004; Moseley 1992, 1997, 1999, 2000) with most attention paid to the environmental collapse of the Tiwanaku (Kolata 1993, 1996, 2000;

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Figure 1. Hypothetical social complexity curve revealing cycles of political development and disintegration in the central Andean highlands c. 1000 BC (after Marcus 1998, 75).

In this paper, I consider a series of convergent political, environmental and economic crises, which coincided with the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400). More specifically, I examine the intersection of several cultural responses to these crises, which most notably include the reorganization of settlement and subsistence strategies by local highland populations. I employ archaeological data from the Andahuaylas region of southern highland Peru to evaluate crisis and response dynamics during late Andean prehistory.

time (e.g., Arkush 2006, 2008; Arkush and Stanish 2005; Covey 2008; Figure 2). The relocation of populations to higher altitudes after AD 1000 also appears to have been accompanied by the reorganization of subsistence patterns with an increased dependence on agro-pastoralism. In particular, some researchers (e.g., Bauer and Kellett 2010; Chepstow-Lusty et al. 2009; Graffam 1992; Kellett 2010; Lane 2006; Seltzer and Hastorf 1990; Stanish 2003) have argued that this period witnessed more intensive camelid husbandry, which was coupled with greater levels of tuber and grain cultivation at higher altitudes. While lower valley areas were still visited and utilized for agricultural production, higher elevation suni and puna areas above 3500 meters above sea level (m asl) near large aggregated hilltop settlements became areas of intensive land use during the highland LIP (Kellett 2010; Parsons et al. 1997, 2000).

The Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400) The LIP of the central Andean highlands is a dynamic period of cultural and ecological change, which was preceded by the development of the Wari and Tiwanaku polities during the Middle Horizon (c. AD 600-1000) and followed by the expansion of the Inca period during the Late Horizon (AD 1438-1532) (Figure 1). The LIP is widely considered to have been a period of political fragmentation with neighboring highland groups in a perpetual state of localized conflict (e.g., Conlee et al. 2004; Covey 2008; Parsons and Hastings 1988). In fact, as Elizabeth Arkush (2008, 343) notes, ‘Because the Late Intermediate Period is by definition a hiatus after the Middle Horizon collapse, warfare has traditionally been seen as a direct outgrowth of that collapse.’ This long-held view is largely based on the extensive distribution of defensible hilltop settlements, which appear in numerous valleys across the region at this

Identifying Crisis during the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400) The central Andean LIP in central highlands was a period of acute cultural and environmental dynamism, which was defined by a series of convergent cultural and ecological crises. While the degree and extent of each crisis, and their specific relationship to others is essential to consider, a full discussion of these complex issues is beyond the scope of this paper. As a first step, I focus attention on the various

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Figure 2. Principal research areas of LIP hilltop settlement in the south central Andes.

crises that characterized the highland LIP, upon which I model the cultural responses to these phenomena. In this section I describe a series of four specific processes that challenged LIP populations of the region.

in the Titicaca Basin caused the lake level and neighboring water table to fall, thereby cutting off raised fields from their water supply and undermining the productive foundation of Tiwanaku agriculture (Ortloff and Kolata 1993; Kolata 1993, 1996, 2000). Existing paleoclimatic data and detailed research on Tiwanaku raised fields suggest that a regional drought surpassed the environmental thresholds of the Tiwanaku state and caused its ultimate collapse. Charles Ortloff and Alan Kolata (1993) suggest that the protracted ‘LIP Drought’ initiated a sequence of disastrous events to the water supply from which Tiwanaku was unable to recover.

Collapse of the Middle Horizon States The dissolution of the large complex polities of Wari and Tiwanaku c. AD 1000 was a momentous event in late Andean prehistory, which marked the end of a lengthy era of sociopolitical and economic development, as well as imperial expansion (e.g., Janusek 2008; Kolata 1993; La Lone 2000; Schreiber 1987a, 1987b, 1992; Williams 2001, 2002). While a regional drought initiating c. AD 1000 is largely accepted to have been the cause of the Tiwanaku collapse (Kolata 1993, 1996, 2000; Ortloff and Kolata 1993), it is still unclear if climate change also played a key role in the demise of the Wari empire.

While the Wari collapse has been largely unexplored, a number of tentative causes have been described including the empire’s immense size and lack of effective management across its territory (La Lone 2000; Schreiber 1992), conflict with Tiwanaku (La Lone 2000; Moseley et al. 1991; Owen 2005; Williams 2002) and impact of regional climate change (Kellett 2010; Seltzer and Hastorf 1990; Williams 2002). While a full discussion of the causes of the Wari collapse is necessarily limited given the paucity of existing research, it was undoubtedly a complex process, which was neither instantaneous nor equally felt by provincial populations. So

In the Titicaca Basin, it appears that the ‘LIP Drought’ was responsible for the economic and political collapse of the Tiwanaku polity (Binford et al. 1997; Kolata 1993, 1996, 2000; Moseley 1997; Ortloff and Kolata 1993). In this scenario, significantly lower amounts (~10-15%) of rainfall

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how exactly did the dissolution of the Middle Horizon states impact the course of central Andean cultural development at the start of the LIP, c. AD 1000?

from approximately AD 1050-1500, and it is documented in both ice and lake cores. The principal ice core data come from the Quelccaya ice cap located in far southern Peru (Thompson et al. 1985). Based on the examination of ice layers of two extracted ice cores, Lonnie Thompson and colleagues argue for the existence of an extended dry period in the central Andes between AD 1160-1500, with arid conditions peaking during AD 1250-1310 (Thompson et al. 1985, 973).

The collapse of the Wari and Tiwanaku polities would have had a major destabilizing effect on the local political landscape, especially in areas that were under their direct control (e.g., Covey 2008; Schreiber 1992; Williams 2002). R. Alan Covey (2008) argues that the collapse of these twin polities initiated a period of political balkanization, which translated into a reorganization of social and economic landscape. In addition, these changes appear to have been most strongly felt by populations living in the capital, the immediate heartland, as well as in far flung colonies and provincial centers (Moseley et al. 1991; Schreiber 1992). Although the specific intensity of the ensuing political vacuum appears to have varied across space, a general pattern of political and settlement decentralization can be observed across much of the former Wari and Tiwanaku territories (Arkush 2008; Covey 2008).

The other principal paleoclimatic data set comes from lake cores from across southern Peru and northwest Bolivia. Several researchers working in the Lake Titicaca region have recovered lake cores, which also support the onset of drier conditions near the beginning of the first millennium AD (Abbot et al. 1997; Binford et al. 1997). Michael Binford and colleagues extracted several lake cores from southern Lake Titicaca (3,800m asl), where sedimentation records and associated radiocarbon dates indicate that the lake level was depressed by approximately 12-17m between c. 1050-1450 AD (Binford et al. 1997). More specifically, they argue that between AD 1030-1280, there was a 10-15% decrease in net precipitation and posit that the lowering of the lake caused a drying of most of the Tiwanaku affiliated canals and raised fields and ultimately undermined the state economy and led to collapse c. AD 1100 (Kolata 1993, 1996, 2000; Ortloff and Kolata 1993). Although the Titicaca Basin serves as the best source of regional paleoclimate records, it should be also noted that the ‘LIP Drought’ has also been confirmed farther to the north in the Cuzco region (Chepstow-Lusty et al. 2003, 2009), as well as in the study area of Andahuaylas (Hillyer et al. 2009).

The widespread pattern of population aggregation and hilltop settlement across the region beginning c. AD 1000 may at least be in part the result of heightened levels of conflict in the absence of a complex polity that maintained a degree of regional peace (Arkush 2008, 343). Kolata (1993, 299) offers the traditional version of events in the Titicaca Basin during the fall and the period immediately following the fall of Tiwanaku: The demise of the Tiwanaku empire brought with it political instability. The “Pax Tiwanaku” imposed by the empire could not longer repress ingrained inter-ethnic hostilities, and the former provinces of the empire dissolved into small polities bitterly contesting land, water and other natural resources. The political disturbances and economic chaos that followed the wake of Tiwanaku’s collapse are brutally reflected in the characteristic pattern of settlement of this period: the fortified village (Kolata 1993, 299).

Subsistence Stress Directly linked to the regional drought was a commensurate strain on local subsistence regimes in the central highlands. The drought had significant impacts on all aspects of subsistence, particularly those dependent on rainfall and spring fed irrigation (Ortloff and Kolata 1993). The Tiwanaku heartland, situated in the Titicaca Basin, was especially vulnerable to lowering of the water table since the majority of intensive agriculture was based on raised field technology (Kolata 1991, 1993, 2000). As Ortloff and Kolata (1993) note for the Titicaca Basin, the LIP drought may have undermined water sources for various types of agriculture in a sequential rather than simultaneous fashion. They argue that spring and rain supplied terraces, as well as canal agriculture, would have been immediately affected by a decrease in precipitation. The more resilient raised field agriculture would have been the last to succumb to the drought since it was directly linked to the water table.

Although the level of political ‘crisis’ during the LIP was hardly uniform across the region, it seems highly probable that the lack of a centralized political authority in concert with a climatic downturn, provided fertile ground for intense competition for land and resources among local ethnic and social units. The result of the collapse of the Middle Horizon states was thus a dynamic of population dispersion, political balkanization, and localized conflict which radically changed the cultural landscape during the first millennium AD.

In contrast to Tiwanaku territory, Wari populations residing farther to the north engaged little in groundwater supplied agriculture (e.g., raised fields), but rather focused on rainfall dependent dry farming, as well as spring and rain supplied terrace agriculture (Hastorf 1993; Schreiber 1992; Williams 2006). It is therefore reasonable to suggest that as a region,

Regional Climate Change A major environmental downturn coincided with the LIP and served as an additional crisis that exacerbated the increasingly volatile political environment. The ‘LIP Drought’ was a chronic period of aridity, which extended

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the central Andes lacked large reserves of ground water (as with the Titicaca Basin) and therefore, was more vulnerable to drought. At lower elevations below 3,500m asl, maize agriculture would have been especially susceptible to drought since its cultivation requires a higher degree of soil moisture for maturation, compared to other highland crops (Hastorf 1993; Winterhalder and Thomas 1978) and there is growing evidence that confirms that Wari populations were dependent on intensive maize agriculture (Finucane 2009; Finucane et al. 2006; Schreiber 1992).

There is no doubt that the enduring threat of attack by neighboring, or more distant groups, would have had a profound effect on the daily life of highland populations. In this context, a prolonged threat of warfare would have served as an additional crisis for the increasingly volatile social and political atmosphere. Furthermore, increased threats of conflict during the LIP stimulated the delineation of territories and division of the highland landscape into defensible, semi-autonomous socio-economic units (Arkush 2008; Bauer and Kellett 2010). The fragmentation of the ethnic landscape would have also placed severe limitations on the expansion of subsistence production, the creation of new and more distant settlements, as well access to critical resources (e.g., water, wood resources, high quality agriculture land).

What happened to highland maize cultivation during the LIP? Since regional climate change included the reduction of precipitation by nearly 15% (Binford et al. 1996) with possible shifts in temperature as well (Ortloff and Kolata 1993; Seltzer and Hastorf 1990), it is probable that these environmental constraints reduced the scope and intensity of maize production to such a degree that they necessitated a shift in agricultural regime. As I discuss later, it appears that local populations selected a broader range of cultivars, especially more hearty and drought tolerant crops (Hastorf 1993, 2001; Kellett 2010; Seltzer and Hastorf 1990).

Finally, as previously mentioned, LIP warfare has been traditionally viewed in a monolithic fashion as the result of a political vacuum, following the collapse of the Middle Horizon states. However, there is now a growing consensus that LIP warfare was spurred on, if not amplified by, resource scarcity and economic stress, which was the result of deteriorating climatic conditions during this time (e.g., Arkush 2008; Nielsen 2001, 2002; Stanish 2003; TorresRouff and Costa-Junqueira 2006). As Arkush (2008, 365) succinctly explains:

Apart from agriculture production, a severe reduction in rainfall likely reduced the availability of water, principally springs. Using prehistoric and modern data, Ortloff and Kolata (1993) convincingly argue that local springs and seeps are very sensitive to periods of drought and were likely the first to disappear (in the Titicaca Basin) during the period of prolonged aridity during the LIP. The scarcity of water for domestic use at large habitation sites likely spurred intensive water conservation and may have also caused periodic strife among local populations. A reduction in precipitation would have added increasing stress to camelid (llama [Lama glama], alpaca (Vicugna pacos]) herds, primarily in the form of increasingly scarce high quality forage. Moreover, aridity would have had an adverse effect on wild flora and fauna, which likely translated into fewer successful hunting and gathering forays. As I elaborate below, one of the primary responses to increasing levels of economic risk was to diversify the resource base with the adoption of a mixed, yet integrated agro-pastoralism (Kuznar 2001; see also Marston 2011).

It is highly probable that drought and attendant resource stress played a significant part in the escalation of war in the Late Intermediate Period. Resource stress could have fostered violent competition for limited arable land, and encouraged raids on stored crops; it may have indirectly led to livestock rustling as people became more reliant on camelids, or perhaps simply caused greater social friction between neighboring communities in hard times. In the context, localized warfare across the region can no longer be considered merely a social phenomenon that occurred solely in response to a political downturn. Rather, a more balanced examination of LIP warfare must also directly address the role of regional environmental instability, economic risk and dietary stress as well.

Conflict

Responding to Crisis during the LIP

As I discussed earlier, the LIP in the central highlands has generally been characterized as a time of chronic warfare by Andean archaeologists (Arkush 2006, 2008; Arkush and Stanish 2005; Covey 2008; Hyslop 1976, 1977; Parsons and Hastings 1988). In actuality, there is increasing evidence that threats of attack were far from continuous, but instead “waxed and waned” over a number of centuries (Arkush 2008, 357). Despite this fact, there are enough ethnohistoric references, as well as archaeological correlates (e.g., defensive fortifications, hilltop settlement) to confirm that intra-ethnic and/or inter-ethnic conflict reached a level not witnessed in previous centuries (Arkush 2006, 2008, Arkush and Stanish 2005; Stanish 2003).

In this portion of the paper, I examine the cultural responses to the convergent cultural and economic crises that characterized the highland LIP. Employing recent archaeological data from the Andahuaylas region (Department of Apurímac) of southern highland Peru, I argue that highland LIP populations responded to multiple crises in two principle ways: 1) the relocation and aggregation of populations to higher altitudes; and 2) the reorganization of subsistence toward a mixed strategy of agro-pastoralism. The integration of these two cultural responses not only appears to have buffered against economic risk and political tensions, but also laid

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Figure 3. Chanka Settlement Project (PAC) area in the Andahuaylas Valley.

a foundation for the long-term survival of local highland groups for upwards of four centuries during the LIP.

The project included a full coverage survey (75km2), as well as a series of test excavations at two neighboring Chanka habitation sites (Kellett 2010; Figure 3). The archaeological survey component of the PAC recorded all Chanka phase (AD 1000-1400) sites (n = 99), which were identified by the presence of diagnostic LIP ceramics and/or limestone (pirka) masonry architecture (Kellett 2010). Isolated corrals (n = 15) and larger corral complexes (n = 13) together composed just over 40% of all recorded structures in the survey area. Habitation sites made up the next most common site type with 15% (n = 10) and then terrace/corral complexes and Chanka tombs each contributed almost 12% (n = 8) of the site sample. In addition, a handful of other structures/site types were recorded and include various defensive structures (i.e. walls, ditches, lookouts), as well as agricultural terraces.

The Chanka Settlement Project: An Introduction The Andahuaylas region of western Apurímac, Peru, was the traditional homeland of the Chanka ethnic group (Figure 2). The Chanka are well known by archaeologists, historians and colonial writers as the traditional foes of the Inca. Most infamous was the legendary Chanka-Inca war (believed to have occurred in the early 1400s) in which the Chanka failed to capture the capital city of Cuzco and were defeated by the Inca (Bauer et al. 2010; Gonzalez Carré 1992). The Chanka Settlement Project (2005-2006), which is part of recent research undertaken in the Chanka homeland of Andahuaylas (e.g., Bauer and Kellett 2010; Bauer et al. 2010), was a multi-tier field project that sought to understand settlement strategies in the valley during the LIP. By using a range of data sets from this project, I examine the cultural responses that the Chanka, and other groups like them, adopted in response to the variable, yet overlapping ecological, economic and political crises of the Late Intermediate Period.

High Elevation Settlement in the Chanka Homeland A total of 10 habitation sites were recorded during the PAC survey and these range in size from 0.5-16 ha with a mean site size of 6ha (Figure 4). Overall 60% (n = 6) of habitation sites are over 5ha in size and only a single habitation site is less than 1ha in size. The largest habitation sites, such as the

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Lucas C. Kellett: Collapse, Climate Change and Conflict

Figure 4. Chanka Settlement Project area in the Andahuaylas Valley.

Based on the strong spatial correlation between habitation sites and steep slopes, it is highly probable that Chanka population centers were at least partially located in selected areas to take advantage of natural defensive positioning. The elevated position of these large sites afforded excellent line-of-site to neighboring settlements, as well as panoramic viewsheds of the surrounding landscapes. These visibility measures would have facilitated communication between hilltop sites, as well as keep settlement residents aware of any potential invaders. In addition, the steep slopes along site boundaries would have effectively repelled invaders. Although site preservation of these large sites is moderate at best, the survey successfully identified defensive features at 40% (n = 4) of Chanka habitation sites. These constructed defensive features include a pair of defensively positioned protective walls along the southeastern approach to PAC123, a defensive ditches at both Luisinayoc (PAA-220) and Achanchi (PAA-225), a large defensive wall on the south side of Achanchi, and as additional defensive wall located at PAC-127 (Figure 4).

immense site of Achanchi (Figure 5), typically extend for hundreds of meters along upper elevation (3700 – 4000m asl) mountaintops and ridgelines. Chanka habitation sites are easily identified by their dense arrangement of agglutinated circular structures intermixed with small patio areas. Based on these house counts, it is projected that these large residential sites housed populations ranging from a few hundred to several thousand (Covey 2008; D’Altroy 1992; D’Altroy and Hastorf 2001). Within the project area, 70% (n = 7) of habitation sites are located above 3,500 m asl, which reflect a strong pattern of population aggregation on upper elevation ridges during the LIP (Figure 4). As previously mentioned, the majority of large Chanka habitation sites are located along the crests of ridges that typically have two steep slopes (perpendicular to the ridge crest) and two accessible entrances at the front and back of the site along ridge crests. In addition, 90%, of Chanka habitation sites are surrounded by steep slopes (> 40°) on at least one side. Similarly, all Chanka habitation sites were located less than 200m from a slope steeper than 30 degrees. Also most (70%, n = 7) Chanka sites are located on low angle (< 10°) and therefore more inhabitable terrain, but in close proximity to steep slopes.

In summary, the archaeological survey yielded only a modest amount of direct evidence for the existence of intense warfare in Andahuaylas during the LIP. While

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Figure 5. Achanchi, the largest Chanka site in the Andahuaylas Valley.

this divergent pattern may simply be a result of poor site preservation, or even sample bias, it may also indicate that the Chanka region did not experience high levels of conflict, as has been observed for other areas of the central Andes (Arkush 2008). Despite this fact, the presence of constructed defensive features, as well as the utilization of defensive topography for the construction of residential sites, appears to have been an effective response to increasing threats of actual or potential conflict among Chanka groups in the Andahuaylas region.

indicates that camelid husbandry activities were organized in a dispersed fashion around large Chanka habitation sites (Figure 4). The largest corral complexes were located above 3700m asl and spaced between ~1 to 4km (1-2 travel hours) apart. A total of fifteen single, isolated corrals were also recorded during survey work and, on average, these small sites were located no further than 2 km from larger corral complexes (Figure 4). It is likely that these single corrals were utilized by individual pastoralists or families on a daily basis during herd movement in the upper suni and puna areas. In contrast, the larger corral complexes likely served as more secure locations for pastoralists to bed close to camelid herds at night to ensure their protection against theft or predators (Flannery et al. 1989).

Agro-Pastoralism in the Andahuaylas Valley Survey Data

Surprisingly, the survey located very few agricultural terraces (n = 4, combined count of isolated terraces and terrace complexes) in the project area. In general, the terrace structures had fairly low rises (1-2 m tall), which were made of uncut (or rough cut) limestone and were spatially dispersed along moderate (10-25°) north facing hill slopes. Terraces were located below habitation sites in warmer valleys and no farther than 3 km from habitation sites. The close proximity of terraces to population centers would have allowed for easy access and low cost efforts to maintain terraces and cultivate crops such as maize and legumes. Despite the obvious advantages of terrace agriculture the scarcity of such infrastructure indicates that the Chanka invested relatively little energy into major landscape transformation. This pattern also suggests the

The Chanka Settlement project found strong evidence of camelid pastoralism during the LIP. Among all site types, corrals were the most frequently (~40% of site sample) encountered site type during the archaeological survey. Corrals were classified into two different types: isolated corrals and corral complexes. Isolated corrals consisted of single, ovoid structures, which were much larger (10-50m in diameter) than typical house structures (3-5m in diameter). In all cases isolated corrals lack adjoining circular house units. In contrast, corral complexes are larger in size (0.53ha), consisting of numerous adjacent corrals, which also contain a random distribution of circular houses. A similar number of isolated corrals (n = 15) and corral complexes (n = 13) were identified during the survey, which

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Chanka agriculture was heavily dependent on dry, or rainfall agriculture, employing a dense arrangement of simple fields on low to moderate angle slopes that were likely concentrated on mid to upper elevation slopes above 3500m asl.

two large sites of Achanchi and Luisinayoc, with maize and potato present at both hilltop sites, whereas common bean (Phaseolus) and quinua (Chenopodium quinua) were identified only at Achanchi. At the outset of this research I posited that the movement of Chanka populations to high elevation settlements during the LIP would have required a commensurate change in subsistence. That is, local populations would have relied on more drought tolerant grains and tubers, rather than maize, which requires a warm, low elevation climate and more available water. In fact, results of the macrobotanical analysis only partially support this hypothesis. The macrobotanical data suggest that, contrary to expectations, maize was still being cultivated in lower valleys and then transported and consumed at distant high elevation residential sites. In general, the paleobotanical data reflect that the Chanka were reliant on a broad range of crops, including native Andean grains (quinua and amaranths [possibly kiwicha]), legumes (beans), tubers (potato) and maize. This broad selection of crops for cultivation during the Chanka phase (AD 1000-1400) contrasts significantly with the previous Wari period, which focused on intensive maize cultivation (Finucane 2009; Finucane et al. 2006; Hastorf 1993, 2001; Schreiber 1992).

Excavation Data – Faunal Remains An additional line of evidence for increased dependence on camelid pastoralism comes from faunal remains collected during test excavations completed at the large Chanka habitation sites of Achanchi and Luisinayoc (Kellett 2010; Maita Agurto 2007; see Figure 5). Excavations at Luisinayoc yielded a total of 7,741 faunal specimens, which were dominated by camelids (13%) and artiodactyls (84%). An examination of the minimum number of individuals (MNI) securely identified in the sample yielded 46.3% (95 individuals) as camelids and fewer numbers of individuals were identified as guinea pig (cuy) (Cavia porcellus), 16.1% [33 individuals]) and artiodactyls (19.0% [39 individuals]). Excavations at Achanchi yielded a total of 9,567 faunal specimens, of which 70% were camelids and a small fraction (5 %) were cuy. Analysis of the MNI data reveals that 51.5% (103 individuals) were camelids, 23.5% (47 individuals) were cuy, and 15.5% (31 individuals) were artiodactyls. It is important to mention that the majority of faunal specimens from both Chanka sites, which were typed as artiodactyls could not be reliably identified as camelids. Despite this fact, there is good reason to believe that a large portion of these specimens were in fact of the camelid family (Camelidae). This conclusion is supported by the abundance of corral sites distributed around large habitation sites, which suggests that Chanka populations were focused primarily on raising domesticated (llama, alpaca) rather than hunting wild species (vicuña [Vicugna vicugna], guanaco (Lama guanicoe) of camelids. In addition, it is unlikely that deer could have supported large Chanka populations that characterized the LIP. In summary the faunal data integrate well with the settlement data and generally support the hypothesis that camelid pastoralism was a mainstay of Chanka subsistence during the LIP.

In conclusion, the settlement and survey data from the Chanka Settlement Project offer convincing evidence that Chanka populations engaged in a locally, integrated form of agro-pastoralism during the LIP. This diverse subsistence regime, which encompassed a suite of different crops, as well as higher levels of camelid pastoralism, would have been efficiently organized from nearby aggregated hilltop sites. The proximity of camelid corrals (isolated corrals and corral complexes) to habitation sites further supports this thesis. Furthermore, there is an abundance of suitable land (i.e. good soil depth, moderate slope) for the dry farming of tubers and grains along mid and upper elevation slopes in close proximity (