Highly diverse Bronze Age population dynamics in Central-Southern Europe and their response to regional climatic patterns

PLoS One. 2018 Aug 8;13(8):e0200709. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0200709. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

The reconstruction of past demographic patterns is a fundamental step towards a better understanding of human-environment relations, especially in terms of quantifiable anthropic impact and population susceptibility to environmental changes. The recently developed Summed Calibrated Probability Distributions (SCPD) approach, based on large collections of archaeological radiocarbon dates, provides a new tool to obtain continuous prehistoric population curves suitable for comparison with palaeoenvironmental time series. Despite a wide application in Mesolithic and Neolithic contexts worldwide, the use of the SCPD method remains rare for post-Neolithic societies. Our aim is to address this visible gap and apply the SCPD approach to South European archeological contexts between the Bronze Age and the transition into the Iron Age (1800-800 cal. BC), then evaluating these results against local archeological narratives and palaeoecological data. We first test the SCPD method at a supra regional scale, ranging from the Ebro to the Danube rivers, and subsequently in five selected regions within this area. We then compare the regional population curves to climate data reconstructed from local palynological records. Our results highlight the contrast between a stable supra regional demographic trend and more dynamic regional patterns. We do not observe any convincing long-term correlations between population and climate, but localized episodes of demographic stagnation or decline are present in conjunction with climatic shifts or extremes. Nevertheless, climate change as a triggering factor should be considered with caution, especially in peripheral areas where the archaeological data is faint, or where local evidence points to contemporaneous, ongoing landscape overexploitation.

Publication types

  • Historical Article
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Archaeology*
  • Climate Change*
  • Europe
  • History, Ancient
  • Humans
  • Population Dynamics / history*
  • Probability

Associated data

  • figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.6754181

Grants and funding

This research is part of the project “Social and Environmental Transitions: Simulating the Past to Understand Human Behaviour,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, under the program CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010, CSD2010-00034 and the project 2014SGR-1169 and 2017SGR-243 funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya. We also acknowledge funds from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, through the Grant No. HAR2012-31036 and HAR2016-76534-C2-1-R. The authors from Kiel University were supported by the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” (GSC 208/2) and by the DFG Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1266 “Scales of Transformation – Human-Environmental Interaction in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies”.