20,000 Years of Societal Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change In
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University of Birmingham 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; Dean, Jonathan R.; Djamali, Morteza; Eastwood, Warren; Fleitmann, Dominik; Haywood, Alan M.; Kwiecien, Ola; Larsen, Joshua; Maher, Lisa A.; Metcalfe, Sarah E.; Parker, Adrian; Petrie, Cameron A.; Primmer, Nick; Richter, Tobias; Roberts, Neil DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1330 License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) Document Version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Citation for published version (Harvard): Jones, MD, Abu-Jaber, N, AlShdaifat, A, Baird, D, Cook, BI, Cuthbert, M, Dean, JR, Djamali, M, Eastwood, W, Fleitmann, D, Haywood, AM, Kwiecien, O, Larsen, J, Maher, LA, Metcalfe, SE, Parker, A, Petrie, CA, Primmer, N, Richter, T, Roberts, N, Roe, J, Tindall, JC, Ünalmer, E & Weeks, L 2019, '20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia', Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1330 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: Jones MD, AbuJaber N, AlShdaifat A, et al. 20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia. WIREs Water. 2019;6:e1330. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1330 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. The express permission of the copyright holder must be obtained for any use of this material other than for purposes permitted by law. •Users may freely distribute the URL that is used to identify this publication. •Users may download and/or print one copy of the publication from the University of Birmingham research portal for the purpose of private study or non-commercial research. •User may use extracts from the document in line with the concept of ‘fair dealing’ under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (?) •Users may not further distribute the material nor use it for the purposes of commercial gain. Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive. If you believe that this is the case for this document, please contact [email protected] providing details and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 Received: 2 May 2018 Revised: 8 November 2018 Accepted: 12 November 2018 DOI: 10.1002/wat2.1330 OVERVIEW 20,000 years of societal vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in southwest Asia Matthew D. Jones1 | Nizar Abu-Jaber2 | Ahmad AlShdaifat1 | Douglas Baird3 | Benjamin I. Cook4 | Mark O. Cuthbert5 | Jonathan R. Dean6 | Morteza Djamali7 | Warren Eastwood8 | Dominik Fleitmann9 | Alan Haywood10 | Ola Kwiecien11 | Joshua Larsen8 | Lisa A. Maher12 | Sarah E. Metcalfe1 | Adrian Parker13 | Cameron A. Petrie14 | Nick Primmer1 | Tobias Richter15 | Neil Roberts16 | Joe Roe17 | Julia C. Tindall10 | Ezgi Ünal-İmer18 | Lloyd Weeks19 1School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK 2Center for the Study of Natural and Cultural Heritage, German Jordanian University, Amman, Jordan 3Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK 4NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York 5School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK 6School of Environmental Sciences, University of Hull, Hull, UK 7Institut Méditerranéen de Biodiversité et d'Ecologie (UMR 7263—CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université/IRD/Université d'Avignon), Aix-en Provence, France 8School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK 9Department of Archaeology and Centre for Past Climate Change, University of Reading, Reading, UK 10School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK 11Institute for Geology, Mineralogy and Geophysics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany 12Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, California 13Department of Social Sciences, Human Origins and Palaeoenvironments Research Group, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK 14Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 15Center for the Study of Early Agricultural Societies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 16School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK 17Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK 18Department of Geological Engineering, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey 19School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia Correspondence The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands has been a critical Matthew D. Jones, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. region for studying how climate has influenced societal change, and this review Email: [email protected] focuses on the region over the last 20,000 years. The complex social, economic, Funding information and environmental landscapes in the region today are not new phenomena and University of Nottingham; Life in Changing understanding their interactions requires a nuanced, multidisciplinary understand- Environments Research Priority Area ing 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 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2019 The Authors. WIREs Water published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. WIREs Water. 2019;6:e1330. wires.wiley.com/water 1of31 https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1330 2of31 JONES ET AL. 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 archaeo- logical 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. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Science of Water > Methods Water and Life > Nature of Freshwater Ecosystems KEYWORDS archaeology, Holocene, hydrology, Iran, Levant, palaeoclimate, Turkey 1 | INTRODUCTION Climate, including drought, has influenced societal change in southwest (SW) Asia, not just in the last decades (e.g., Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane, Seager, & Kushnir, 2015), but for millennia (e.g., Kaniewski, Van Campo, & Weiss, 2012). The Fertile Crescent, its hilly flanks and surrounding drylands have long been a critical region for studying human societal change, first, as being an initial stepping point out of Africa for the first anatomically modern humans (Bae, Douka, & Petraglia, 2017; Hershkovitz et al., 2018), and then as a center for some of the earliest agricultural villages (Barker, 2009; Willcox, Buxo, & Herveux, 2009) and cit- ies (Lawrence, Philip, Hunt, Snape-Kennedy, & Wilkinson, 2016; Ur, 2017). Since these early developments, the region has been the scene of many further social, technological and economic changes and exchanges. While climate has often been discussed as one potential driver for these developments (e.g., Büntgen et al., 2016; H. Weiss, 2016), the modern complex social, economic, and environmental landscapes of the region emphasize the importance of a nuanced, multidisciplinary understanding of past cli- mate change and its relationship to human behaviors (e.g., Jones, Maher, Richter, Macdonald, & Martin, 2016; Ur, 2015). Under- standing the vulnerabilities of social and natural systems to change requires high-resolution reconstructions and modelling of the co-evolution of climate and human communities through time, and SW Asia provides a uniquely long record to explore these dynamics. With climate model projections for the region indicating rising temperatures and reduced rainfall in the coming decades (Pachauri et al., 2014), it is important to consider prehistoric and historical datasets regarding the relationships between climate,