G06 - Climate Change as a Pacemaker of Neolithic Cultural Change: Global Perspectives

Session Organisers: Neil Roberts, Catherine Kuzucuoğlu

Category: Natural Environment

Session Abstract: The idea that changes in climate have acted as a stimulus for events in human history is a long-standing one. Some of this work sees the relationship as a deterministic one, in which climatic adversity prompted societal decline or collapse, often inferred from archaeological evidence of regional site abandonment. But whether determinist or possibilist in character, the relationship between climate and society has generally been envisaged as one in which periods of favourable climate would expand the food supply and hence allow human populations to grow. By the same logic, adverse climatic conditions, such as major droughts, have been linked to societal and demographic crises, as the food supply shrank and human populations exceeded the available resources. In regions such as southwest Asia it has long been hypothesized that the beginnings of Neolithic agriculture were connected to the major shift in global climate at the end of the last Ice Age from cold (and generally dry) to warmer and generally wetter. This session will explore the links between climatic changes and the emergence and spread of early farming societies in different geographical settings where agriculture and sedentary life developed, from Mesoamerica, through Africa and Europe to South and East Asia. It seeks to explore research that critically evaluates the available evidence and is genuinely interdisciplinary in character.

Room: D

04/11/2024

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
13:00 - 13:20	Liviu Giosan	Noah’s Flood in the Black Sea and the Spread of Neolithic into Europe: Quo Vadis?
13:20 - 13:40	Marta Andriiovych	Around the Black Sea: the spread of Neolithic settlements before and after the cooling event 8.2 KY BP
13:40 - 14:00	Caroline Heitz, Joe Roe	3000 years of climate change impact on early ‘pile-dwelling’ farming communities around the Alps: New tree-ring-based archaeological and paleoclimatic proxies.
14:00 - 14:20	Lech Czerniak, Joanna Święta-Musznicka, Anna Pędziszewska, Agnieszka Matuszewska	Changes in LBK settlements correlate with fluctuations in climatic conditions. A palynological view on the Neolithisation of Central Europe

Coffee Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
14:45 - 15:05	Arman Tekin	Paleoclimatic Changes on The Southern Kahramanmaraş Region During The Neolithic Period: The Macrophysical Climate Model Approach
15:05 - 15:25	Neil Roberts	Climate as a driver of Neolithic human-environment dynamics on the Konya plain, south central Anatolia
15:25 - 15:45	Peter F Biehl, Arkadiusz Marciniak	Archaeological and palaeo-environmental evidence for the 8.2k cal BP climate event at Çatalhöyük
15:45 - 16:05	Ayşin Konak, Tolunay Bayram	Environmental and Climatic Factors Affecting Settlement Location Selection in the Lake District (Turkey)

Coffee Break

Start Time - End Time	Authors	Title
16:30 - 16:50	Andrew M.T. Moore, Alexia Smith, Loïc Harrault, Peter Rowley-Conwy, Karen Milek	New evidence from Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic Abu Hureyra, Syria, for the development of agriculture in Western Asia
16:50 - 17:10	Caroline Malone	A Neolithic that fails: The Maltese Temple Culture and climatic instability