War, Food, Climate Change, and the Decline of the Roman Empire

7 Recent research on climate, environment, and society in the ancient Greek world

“…In many parts of temperate Europe, tree ring data offer some of the best high-resolution climate proxies but such data is limited for Greece and the data series that do exist from northern Greece only cover later periods, spanning the Middle Ages from AD 1089 onwards (Griggs et al 2007;Klippel et al 2018;Esper et al 2021). Most of the recently published proxy data from Greece consist, instead, of sediment records extracted from lacustrine and marine environments as well as climate proxies derived from cave speleothems (Finné et al 2011;2019;Weiberg et al 2016).…”

“…Recent work on sediments from Greek lake records has also been focused on new methods and analyses of biological proxies. In the past 10 years, the study of diatoms as potential climate proxies has been carried out at multiple lacustrine archives in the Greek mainland: Lake Dojran (Francke et al 2013); Lake Prespa (Cvetkoska et al 2014); Aghios Floros (Katrantsiotis et al 2016); Messara plain (Crete) (Ghilardi et al 2018;2019); Lake Kournas (Crete) (Jouffroy-Bapicot et al 2021) and Lake Vouliagmeni (Emmanouilidis et al 2022a). Diatoms are single-celled species of algae that exist in lake environments, and different species cluster in certain hydraulic environments.…”

“…Much recent work has also taken broader diachronic perspectives on human responses to climate variability and environmental changes over longer periods in Greece and the Aegean. Such syntheses have been produced by scholars working within both archaeology and environmental sciences, highlighting the importance of understanding climate variability and socio-environmental developments both in light of negative as well as beneficial climate change, primarily in terms of dry or humid conditions (Weiberg et al 2016;2019;Weiberg, Bonnier and Finné 2021). The work carried out by the DoLP group, which uses GIS-based spatial analyses of survey data and palaeoclimatic sequences from cave records, displays staggering synchronicity between archaeological periods of land use expansion and above-average wet conditions in most, but not all, periods (a notable exception is the MHIII-LHI time frame).…”

“…Pollen grains are primarily preserved in lake, wetland, or within marine sediments, meaning that the recovery of data is largely restricted to very specific areas of the landscape that may not be situated close to where we have recorded archaeological data. Pollen records from southern Greece are currently constituted by archives primarily in lowland areas, usually coastal environments, while in northern Greece the available pollen records generally come from inland locations (Weiberg et al 2016;2019;Izdebski et al 2020). The environmental context of the different archives should therefore be kept in mind when looking at differences in land cover trajectories between different areas of Greece (see discussion in Weiberg et al 2019).…”

“…2014; 2018c; Haldon and Rosen 2018; Izdebski and Mulryan 2019). Kyle Harper’s book on climate change in the later Roman Empire (2017) has prompted much critique and debate on the possible impact of climate on societal transformations in this period (Erdkamp 2019; Haldon et al 2018a; 2018b). Discussions on climate change and socio-environmental trajectories in the Greek world during the historical periods have, however, been much more limited, particularly in the context of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic eras (as has also been discussed in Post 2022a; Weiberg and Finné 2022).…”