(Un)Earthing Civilization: Holocene Climate Crisis, City-State Origins and the Birth of Writing

Abstract

Today, concern about population displacement triggered by climate change is prompting some sovereign states to tighten security measures, as well as inciting ethically and politically motivated calls to relax border controls. This paper explores resonances between the current climate predicament and events in the mid-Holocene. Paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence is reviewed, suggesting that an abrupt turn to cooler, drier weather in the 4th millennium BCE triggered high volume migration to fertile river valleys—most fully documented in Mesopotamia but also visible in other regions around the world. This unprecedented agglomeration of bodies has been linked to the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture and the rise of city-states. In conversation with the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, this paper draws upon archaeological research to conceptualize urban wall building and emergent practices of graphical notation as different forms of mediation. Both city walls and early writing, it is argued, deal with the interplay of mobilism and sedentarism, and both ‘media’ entail tactile, plastic use of local materials—namely riverbank clay. This paper addresses the paradox that the underpinning of ‘civilization’ by these once experimental media may now be fundamentally restricting socio-political, cultural, cognitive and embodied capacities to engage effectively with climate-driven upheaval. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Filling the hole? On new geographies of the subsurface

“…On the one hand, strata indicates the ultimately excessive and almost foundational role of subsurface processes to social life; yet on the other hand, stratification is taken to be a process of deep history/temporality that undergirds sociality as such—beyond metaphor. Clark (2011, 2019) is at pains to attend to this “double articulation” by describing the ways “inhuman” earth processes “exceed” the human in both their deep temporality and spatiality, and yet at various historic moments condition the emergence of art, politics, and social sexuality. The underground for Clark (2021) further represents the potential for a subsurface involution or “capture” of fire and combustion by the social—illuminating the earliest cave art, serving as metaphor for enlightenment, and materially inciting war.…”

Planetary Cities: Fluid Rock Foundations of Civilization

“…If there is any consolation, it is that 'civilization' brought this predicament upon itself precisely by doing all these things, and often doing them astonishingly well. Much of the foundation of urban life rests on collective aptitudes for capturing and elaborating upon our planet's own structuring solid-fluid phase transitions, an insight that is clearest at the formative moments of certain cities -which was itself a time of considerable climatic instability (Clark, 2020). The resurgent planetary thought I have been sketching out would have us see cities as being crafted, in part, by skilled collective acts delving into and prising open transitional processes generated by a far-from-equilibrium planetary body.…”

“…And no less than the transition between solid rock and fluid suspension, social sedentarism tends to be partial and provisional. Archaeologist Anne Porter (2012) stresses the continued importance of the relationship between sedentarism and pastoral mobilism in ancient Mesopotamia, while anthropologist James Scott (2017: 231) draws attention to 'the millennia of flux and movement back and forth between sedentary and non-sedentary modes of subsistence and the many mixed options in between' (see also Clark, 2020).…”