Was There a 3.2 ka Crisis in Europe? A Critical Comparison of Climatic, Environmental, and Archaeological Evidence for Radical Change during the Bronze Age–Iron Age Transition

Abstract

The globalizing connections that defined the European Bronze Age in the second millennium BC either ended or abruptly changed in the decades around 1200 BC. The impact of climate change at 3.2 ka on such social changes has been debated for the eastern Mediterranean. This paper extends this enquiry of shifting human–climate relationships during the later Bronze Age into Europe for the first time. There, climate data indicate that significant shifts occurred in hydroclimate and temperatures in various parts of Europe ca. 3.2 ka. To test potential societal impacts, I review and evaluate archaeological data from Ireland and Britain, the Nordic area, the Carpathian Basin, the Po Valley, and the Aegean region in parallel with paleoclimate data. I argue that 1200 BC was a turning point for many societies in Europe and that climate played an important role in shaping this. Although long-term trajectories of sociopolitical systems were paramount in defining how and when specific societies changed, climate change acted as a force multiplier that undermined societal resilience in the wake of initial social disjunctures. In this way, it shaped, often detrimentally, the reconfiguration of societies. By impacting more directly on social venues of political recovery, realignment, and reorganization, climate forces accentuate societal crises and, in some areas, sustained them to the point of sociopolitical collapse.

Vegetation and climate dynamics at the dawn of human settlement: multiproxy palaeoenvironmental evidence from the Hashilan Wetland, western Iran

“…Interestingly, similar to the other episodes of enhanced erosion identified in the Hashilan Wetland sediment core, this episode is also coeval with a cold and dry climate event known as the 3.2 ka event ( ~3.3 to 2.9 kcal BP) that influenced Late Bronze and Early Iron Age communities in different regions including southwestern Asia (Neumann and Parpola, 1987;Alpert and Neumann, 1989;Shaikh Baikloo Islam, 2021;Vaezi et al, 2022), the eastern Mediterranean (Kaniewski et al, 2019) and western Europe (Molloy, 2022).…”

“…A notable drop in MS between 3.3 and 2.9 kcal bp is associated with increased erosion and influx of coarse‐grained sediments with calcite from the catchment into the wetland, which is synchronous with arid conditions identified in a peat core from southeast Iran (Vaezi et al, 2022) and increased aeolian deposition in Lake Neor, northwest Iran (Sharifi et al, 2015). Interestingly, similar to the other episodes of enhanced erosion identified in the Hashilan Wetland sediment core, this episode is also coeval with a cold and dry climate event known as the 3.2 ka event ( ~3.3 to 2.9 kcal bp ) that influenced Late Bronze and Early Iron Age communities in different regions including southwestern Asia (Neumann and Parpola, 1987; Alpert and Neumann, 1989; Shaikh Baikloo Islam, 2021; Vaezi et al, 2022), the eastern Mediterranean (Kaniewski et al, 2019) and western Europe (Molloy, 2022).…”

Living through changing climates: Temperature and seasonality correlate with population fluctuations among Holocene hunter-fisher-gatherers on the west coast of Norway

“…Moreover, conducting further and future cross-regional studies in other Scandinavian coastal regions where comparable studies have yet to be conducted would help to further develop the methodology, and either strengthen or contrast the results from Western Norway. Future work would also benefit from establishing protocols for data retrieval in the field, or the analysis of pertinent archaeological, palaeoecological, or even pathogenic traces, that could indicate the occurrence of large-scale socio-ecological deterioration with resulting demographic declines (Molloy, 2022).…”

Sustainability and duration of early central places in prehispanic Mesoamerica

“…By using apogee length as a key dimension of sustainability, we avoid the pitfall of attributing causality to presumed correlations between specific environmental perturbations and hypothesized human responses. In archaeology, the lion's share of such attempts not only place undue stress on available chronological controls, but they also sidestep the growing recognition that how people respond to environmental perturbations is in large part a consequence of organizational effectiveness both prior to and during challenges (e.g., Middleton, 2017;Molloy, 2022). Our focus on sustainability recognizes that perturbations may be environmental, economic, or sociopolitical, and that most frequently these stresses are synergistically intertwined (Fisher and Feinman, 2005;Løvschal, 2022;Silva et al, 2022).…”