Coping with the Cold – Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Communities during the 3.7 ka ‘Löbben’ Glacier Advance (ca. 1900–1450 BCE)

Caroline Heitz, Kristin Ismail-Meyer, Cyrielle Aellen, and Joe Roe

Paper presented at Climate of the Past and Societal Responses to Environmental Changes (Climpast), Bern, 5–8 June 2024, 2024.

Abstract

Exploring how waterfront communities coped with floods and long-term lake level changes in the prehistoric past is crucial for a deeper understanding of the vulnerabilities and resilience capabilities related to climate-driven hydrological hazards in the present and future. In this paper responses to climate change effects on lakeshore settlements during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Alpine region will be examined using high temporal resolution data from the UNESCO World Heritage pile dwellings. Rising lake levels repeatedly rendered former lakeshore settlement areas uninhabitable and led to temporary interruptions of local settlement activities. To omit pitfalls of environmental determinism and to critically assess the narrative of the causal influence of climatic variability, we apply a socio-archeological mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods from archaeology and micromorphology with time series statistics on temporally highly resolved archaeological and paleoclimatic proxy data. First results show that Late Neolithic settlements were resistant to seasonal flooding but vulnerable to longer-term lake level rises of higher magnitudes. Settlement communities as such, however, where resilient to both, as spatial mobility and translocal socio-spatial configurations were an inherent part of their way of life. For the Bronze Age, however, these interrelationships are still poorly understood and subject of our current research project “RISE: Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Waterfront Communities (2200-800 BCE)”.