Description
By (author) Rosen Arlene Miller
Short /annotation
This book provides a , based upon research evidence from the Near East and elsewhere, of changes in climate and how they affected social and political developments. It includes three major case studies of the Neolithic, Early Bronze, and Roman/Byzantine periods.
In this fascinating in-depth study, Arlene Rosen highlights the unique and varied ways that different societies respond to their changing environments, going against the commonly held notion of simple climatic determinism. Social responses to climate change are the result of human perceptions of nature and their environment. From the Terminal Pleistocene through to the Late Holocene, Rosen describes various communities” responses to climate change, further exploring the intriguing connections between climate and society. A must-read for archaeologists, geographers, students, and historians!
Table of contents
1 Holocent Climate and Society 2 Tools for Understanding Paleoenvironments in the Southern Levant 3 Land and History: Introduction to the Modern Landscape and Historical Framework 4 Paleoenvironments of the Near East: The Retreat of the Pleistocene 5 Holocene Paleoenvironments of the Near East 6 From Hunter-Gatherers to Village Farmers: The Role of Climate Change in the Origins of Agriculture 7 Early Complex Societies: Climate Change and Collapse of Early Bronze Age Societies 8 Empires in the Desert 9 Civilizing Climate
Review quote
Climate and climate change have long been acknowledged as fundamental factors in the development of human societies and economies, but the complex and varied relationship between people and climate is often presented in simplistic or deterministic terms.This important volume investigates various episodes in human history in which different societies-and differentsectors of those societies-reacted to climatic fluctuations of different magnitudes. Through the use of case studies of hunter-gatherers, early complex societies and empires, Miller Rosen deftly demonstrates how different societies and social structures contended with climatic variations in sometimes ambiguous ways, either succumbing to such forces, or over-riding them when conditions allowed.While an understanding of climate change is critical to the future of global populations, it is equally important to appreciate what impact such changes might have wrought in the past. This important book will no doubt stimulate critical thinking on an important and timely subject.
Review quote
Civilizing Climate certainly ranks as the foremost of Arlene Miller Rosen”s many contributions to our understanding of the complex relationship between humans, environment, and climate in the ancient Near East. Regrettably, as earth scientists havebecome progressively able to reconstruct ancient climatic sequences across the globe in the last two decades or so, an increasing number of scholars have sought to link major junctures of transformational or historical change in the ancient Near East to climatic perturbations known to have affected the area throughout the Holocene. A problem that mars most of these studies is that they implicitly treat ancient Near Eastern societies as passive hostages to climatic events that they were unable to either foresee or forestall.Civilizing Climate represents a very timely and welcome correction to such simplistic views. Miller Rosen treats Holocene climatic changes as one of many relevant factors in understanding ancient Near Eastern socio-evolutionary trajectories, and she emphasizes in equal parts the role of the environment in creating incentives or disincentives for individual and collective human action and the ability of humans to either exacerbate the impact of climatic conditions beyond their
Review quote
This groundbreaking book interprets how climate change has pl
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