Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

Explanations for the Late Bronze Age crisis and collapse in the eastern Mediterranean are legion: migrations, predations by external forces, political struggles within dominant polities or system collapse among them, inequalities between centers and peripheries, climatic change and natural disasters, disease/plague. There has never been any overarching explanation to account for all the changes within and beyond the eastern Mediterranean, some of which occurred at different times from the mid to late 13th throughout the 12th centuries B.C.E. The ambiguity of the evidence-material, textual, climatic, chronologicaland the differing contexts involved across the central-eastern Mediterranean make it difficult to disentangle background noise from boundary conditions and to distinguish cause from effect. Can we identify the protagonists of the crisis and related events? How useful are recent explanations that focus on climate and/or chronology in providing a better understanding of the crisis? This article reviews the current state of the archaeological and historical evidence and considers the coherence of climatic explanations and overprecise chronologies in attempting to place the "crisis" in context. There is no final solution: the human-induced Late Bronze Age "collapse" presents multiple material, social, and cultural realities that demand continuing, and collaborative, archaeological, historical, and scientific attention and interpretation. 1 introduction Over the years, the Late Bronze Age "crisis" or "collapse" in the eastern Mediterranean has presented archaeologists and ancient historians with endless fodder for consumption, consideration, and speculation. This horizon of change typically has assumed considerable historical significance-the end of a long-standing high-culture era of interregional connectivity followed by major reorientations, change, and decline-as evident from the titles of books like The Crisis Years or the recently published 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. 2 Cline's 1177 B.C., like the present study, seeks to explain the complexities that brought an end to the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean. Thus, there are inevitable overlaps between our work and his in the types and range of data presented, but not in the way they are presented, nor in the readership for whom they are intended. 3 The present study aims to 1 We thank Julia Gruhot for assistance converting references to AJA format, and Luke Sollars for preparing fig. 7. We hope that readers will join the discussion on AJA Online (www.ajaonline.org). 2 Ward and Joukowsky 1992; Cline 2014. 3 The precise dates (including the title) of Cline's volume are really best guesses from a limited set of viable radiocarbon dates, a few anchor points in documentary sources, and circular reasoning, all of which give his narrative an exactitude in sequences and correspondences too smoothly linked for comfort. His reading of the documentary record is commendable, but the discussion of "natural causes" is inadequate and, as ever, ...

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