20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia

Jones, Matthew D; Abu-Jaber, Nizar; Alshdaifat, Ahmad; Baird, Douglas; Cook, Benjamin I; Cuthbert, Mark O.; Dean, Jonathan R.; Djamali, Morteza; Eastwood, Warren; Fleitmann, Dominik; Haywood, Alan; Kwiecien, Ola; Larsen, Joshua; Maher, Lisa A.; Metcalfe, Sarah E.; Parker, Adrian; Petrie, Cameron A.; Primmer, Nick; Richter, Tobias; Roberts, Neil; Roe, Joe; Tindall, Julia C.; Ünal‐İmer, Ezgi; Weeks, Lloyd

Abstract

The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic, and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and understanding their interactions requires a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of the past. This review builds on a history of collaboration between the social and natural palaeoscience disciplines. We provide a multidisciplinary, multiscalar perspective on the relevance of past climate, environmental, and archaeological research in assessing present day vulnerabilities and risks for the populations of southwest Asia. We discuss the complexity of palaeoclimatic data interpretation, particularly in relation to hydrology, and provide an overview of key time periods of palaeoclimatic interest. We discuss the critical role that vegetation plays in the human–climate–environment nexus and discuss the implications of the available palaeoclimate and archaeological data, and their interpretation, for palaeonarratives of the region, both climatically and socially. We also provide an overview of how modelling can improve our understanding of past climate impacts and associated change in risk to societies. We conclude by looking to future work, and identify themes of “scale” and “seasonality” as still requiring further focus. We suggest that by appreciating a given locale's place in the regional hydroscape, be it an archaeological site or palaeoenvironmental archive, more robust links to climate can be made where appropriate and interpretations drawn will demand the resolution of factors acting across multiple scales.

Citation

Jones, M. D., Abu-Jaber, N., Alshdaifat, A., Baird, D., Cook, B. I., Cuthbert, M. O., …Weeks, L. (2019). 20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 6(2), Article e1330. https://doi.org/10.1002/WAT2.1330

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 12, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Feb 10, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019-03
• Deposit Date: Feb 12, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 12, 2019
• Journal: Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water
• Print ISSN: 2049-1948
• Electronic ISSN: 2049-1948
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Article Number: e1330
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/WAT2.1330
• Keywords: Archaeology; Holocene; Hydrology; Iran; Levant; Palaeoclimate; Turkey
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1152606
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wat2.1330
• Additional Information: This will appear in the journal WIREs Water.