Abstract
Over the past 8,000 years, Southwest Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean have seen the rise of cities, states and empires. Climate fluctuations are generally considered to be a significant factor in these changes because in pre-industrial societies they directly relate to food production and security. In the short term, "collapse" events brought about by extreme weather changes such as droughts have been blamed for declines in population, social complexity and political systems. More broadly, the relationships between environment, settlement and surplus production drive most models for the development of urbanism and hierarchical political systems. The archaeology of this region provides us with a rich archive of information on adaptation to climate change, successes and failures which should be highly informative for current debates on sustainability and resilience. However, practitioners in the historical sciences have not been successful in translating their insights into sustainability science and policy circles. This lecture will critically review some of the ways in which climate change has been linked to social change by archaeologists working in Southwest Asia, and suggests some new ways to generate genuinely useful insights from the past for the present using archaeological data.
