Journal of Archological Science 25,2 (1998), pp. 185-86

From: JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL SCIENCE 25,2 (1998), pp. 185-86

Mike Baillie

Book Review

By Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse

Third Millennium BC Climate Change and Old World Collapse.

Dalfes, H.N., Kukla, G. and Weiss, H. (Eds) 1996 

Springer-Verlag (Published in cooperation with NATO

Scientific Affairs Division), Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Barcelona, 

Budapest, Hong Kong, London, Milan, Paris, Santa Clara, Singapore, 

Tokyo

ISBN 3-540-61892-9

xiv, 728 pages, 156 figures, 35 tables 

price DM 398,-; öS 2905.40; sFr 347,-; £ 172.-

This volume represents a brave attempt to bring together the evidence 

for an environmental event in the later third millennium BC. 

Thirty-three papers attempt to assemble the evidence from various 

natural records and from archaeology. Their success is inevitably 

constrained by the one key factor critical in any such endeavour - 

chronological resolution. Thus, as a preliminary to the review I feel 

it is necessary to set the scene from a chronological standpoint.

The problem posed by Dalfes, Kukla and Weiss is an inherently 

interesting one. At the time the papers were assembled Weiss and 

Courty were of the opinion that somewhere around 2200 BC there had 

been a truly catastrophic environmental event. There was also a lot of 

evidence pointing to the centuries between, say, 2300 BC and 1900 BC 

representing some sort of environmental downturn, with widely altered 

precipitation patterns. So a major question could be couched as 

follows.. Were the widespread effects in Asia, Africa and Eastern 

Europe actually the result of a general decline over some centuries, 

or were they the result of an initial catastrophic trigger event with 

longer-term implications? This is a general problem in studies of the 

past where dating resolution is poor and where it is impossible to 

relate different strands of evidence in real time. It is well typified 

by the "suck in and smear" effects suggested in Baillie (1991). These 

contrary effects represent a serious impediment to understanding past 

phenomena. Abrupt or "point" events tend to be smeared by radiocarbon 

dating. Thus radiocarbon effectively conceals abrupt events. The 

converse case is where precisely-dated events, e.g. abrupt 

environmental downturns deduced from tree-rings, tend to "suck in" 

proximate but poorly dated evidence. In such cases it is easy to 

envisage the creation of false horizons.

The present volume could be viewed as an exposition on exactly these

concepts. However, it is also important to know that new evidence, 

deduced since the volume was produced, has actually made these points 

even more emphatically. It is known that an abrupt downturn in Irish 

oaks at 2354-2345 BC (Baillie 1995) falls close to the Icelandic Hekla 

4 tephra horizon dated to 2310+/-20 CalBC by the wiggle-matching of 

high precision radiocarbon dates (Hall et al. 1994). Courty (1997) has 

now revised the dating of the original c.2200 BC abrupt environmental 

event seen at Tell Leilan, in Syria, to c.2350 BC! Thus this volume of

papers has now to be seen against the existence of what may well be a 

very dramatic and widespread environmental downturn - a classic point 

event - the nature of which is hinted at by the report of both tephra 

and glass spherules at and around the destruction layer at Tell 

Leilan.

Do the contributing authors succeed in convincing the reader of the

existence, and chronology, of the proposed environmental change(s)? 

The contributions (and I will mention only a few) start with Hassan 

covering the breakdown known as the First Intermediate Period in 

Egypt, given as 2180-2134 BC, though these cannot be true calendrical 

dates. Hassan discusses the issue of the Nile floods in the context of 

lake levels in Africa and suffers immediately the problem of 

attempting to handle traditional historical dates in Egypt and 

radiocarbon chronologies in Africa. Elsewhere Butzer quantifies the 

difficulties by pointing out that at Lake Turkana, even with 15 

radiocarbon determinations the dating of an abrupt rise in level 

around 2150-2050 BC has "a relatively course resolution of +/-100 

years". Butzer questions the very idea of a global event and sees no 

good evidence for an abrupt change to "greater aridity affecting the 

Near East" between 2400-1900 BC.

These few lines nicely exemplify the difficulties. Are we looking at, 

or for, an event starting at 2400 or 2350 or 2200 or 2180 BC? Butzer 

with his "2400-1900 BCE" has broadened the debate to a full half 

millennium - a time period so long that we could reasonably expect 

some environmental changes to be recorded in most areas. Courty and 

Weiss remind us that there are possibly related socio-economic 

disturbances from Egypt, Palestine, the Indus and the Aegean, but of 

course there is no good evidence to link these possibly-related 

collapses chronologically. Virtually the same applies in the Aegean 

handled by Manning. While traditionally there is an Aegean wave of 

collapse around 2200 BC, the dating is poor. The Early Helladic II 

civilization collapses just when it seems to be at its peak, but what 

date is the collapse? Is it c.2350 BC, or c.2200 BC? Manning points 

to a related episode of severe soil erosion, unfortunately dated by a 

single radiocarbon determination, which calibrates to 2900-2350 CalBC, 

but ends up concluding that whatever the date of the EHII collapse the 

date of the start of the succeeding EHIII is "after c.2300-2200 BC 

(again with no precision)".

Really this is the joy of the whole book. Whether looking at evidence 

from the Indus collapse, from drought in Bohemia, from pollen 

sequences in Turkey or the Near East or Italy or from varves in 

Germany, just about everyone thinks they can see evidence for 

environmental change somewhere in the late third millennium BCE. 

No-one can specify whether its initiation is really abrupt, nor when 

that initiation was. Courty and Weiss have set a series of hares 

running with their apparently abrupt and catastrophic event at c2200 

BC (now c2350 BC). Can anyone else catch up? Students can be set 

endless projects to mine this book in search of the answer. 

I cannot resist drawing attention to Harvey Weiss's concluding 

remarks. Given their evidence for what appears to be a "blast from the 

sky" at Tell Leilan, Weiss is put in the uncomfortable position of 

being probably the first archaeologist to have to suggest an impact 

from cometary debris in recent millennia. I have absolutely no 

problems with that concept but Weiss does; he is torn between claiming 

a "hit" and being cautious. He stakes his claim to immortality by 

saying 

The abrupt climate change at 2200 BC (now 2350 BC), 

regardless of an improbable impact explanation, 

situates hemispheric social collapse in a global, 

but ultimately cosmic, context.

If Baillie (1998) ever sees print, Weiss is going to find strong 

circumstantial support that he is probably correct on all counts. 

With abrupt change in ancient records, previously obscured by poor 

chronological control, more common than previously imagined.

Kukla presents a nice piece on the philosophical difficulty of 

disproving events "it is more difficult to prove that something didn't 

happen than that it did". This is much in keeping with the suck-in 

effect, where loosely dated evidence may be drawn in to support an 

event. It then becomes difficult to disprove the event as this would 

require better dating of a range of poorly-dated phenomena. This 

raises the question whether the act of postulating a significant event 

circa 2200 BC (now 2350 BC) has actually created one? I don't 

personally think it does. Sufficiently many of the 33 contributions 

see evidence for environmental alteration in the later third 

millennium BC that something has to have been going on. Their problem 

is that in any period of three to four, to five, centuries there is 

plenty of time for all sorts of environmental downturns in all sorts 

of areas. The real question remains, is there any evidence for a 

synchronous global, or even hemispheric, environmental event. Nothing 

in the book currently proves that there was. However, the drawing 

together of the several contributions provides the student with a mine 

of relevant information. The book is a must for the library shelves of 

any departments interested in environmental change or in the 

archaeology of the third millennium BC or in systems collapse.

The book has typographical errors sprinkled throughout and several 

papers clearly required more rigorous proof reading by the editors. 

More damning in a volume of this kind is the lack of a consistent 

convention on dates. This is particularly significant when the 

intention is to see what happened in a tight period of a few centuries 

some four millennia ago. Ideally all historical and 

dendrochronological dates should have been AD and BC, or BCE. All 

historical/archaeological dates older than 600 BC should have been 

quoted with estimated errors; this would also apply to dates from 

ice-cores and varve sequences. Raw radiocarbon ages should have been 

presented as BP with quoted errors, while calibrated radiocarbon ages 

should have been signalled as CalAD or CalBC and should have been 

quoted with their calibrated 2-sigma ranges. Failure to enforce a 

dating code means that the reader has to work hard to compare evidence 

both within and between papers. None of these criticisms damage the 

work as a whole.

References

Baillie, M.G.L. 1991 Suck in and smear - two related chronological

problems for the 90s. Journal of Theoretical Archaeology 2, 12-16

Baillie, M.G.L. 1995 Dendrochronology and the Chronology of the Irish

Bronze Age, in Waddell, J. and Shee Twohig, E. Eds Ireland in the 

Bronze Age. The Stationery Office, Dublin. 30-37

Baillie 1998 From Exodus to Arthur. Batsford, London (forthcoming)

Courty, M-A. 1997 Causes and Effects of the 2350 BC Middle East 

Anomaly Evidenced by Micro-Debris Fallout, Surface Combustion and Soil 

Explosion. Abstract O-5 Second SIS Cambridge Conference Natural 

Catastrophes During Bronze Age Civilizations. Fitzwilliam College 

(11-13 July 1997)

Hall, V.A., Pilcher, J.R. and McCormac, F.G. 1994 Icelandic volcanic 

ash and the mid-Holocene Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) decline in the 

North of Ireland; no correlation. The Holocene 4, 79-83

Copyright 1998, Academic Press

==============================

THE CATASTROPHIC END OF THE NORSE CULTURE IN GREENLAND 

L.K. Barlow*), J.P. Sadler, A.E.J. Ogilvie, P.C. Buckland, T. Amorosi, 

J.H. Ingimundarson, P. Skidmore, A.J. Dugmore, T.H. McGovern: 

Interdisciplinary investigations of the end of the Norse western 

settlement in Greenland. HOLOCENE, 1997, Vol.7, No.4, pp.489-499

*) UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, INST ARCTIC & ALPINE RES, BOULDER, CO, 

80309, USA

The loss of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland around the mid 

fourteenth century has long been taken as a prime example of the 

impact of changing climate on human populations. This study employs an 

interdisciplinary approach combining historical documents, detailed 

archaeological investigations, and a high-resolution proxy climate 

record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) to investigate 

possible causes for the end of this settlement. Historical climate 

records, mainly from Iceland, contain evidence for lowered 

temperatures and severe weather in the north Atlantic region around 

the mid-fourteenth century. Archaeological, palaeoecological and 

historical data specifically concerning the Western Settlement suggest 

that Norse living conditions left little buffer fur unseasonable 

climate, and provide evidence for a sudden and catastrophic end around 

the mid-fourteenth century. Isotopic data from the GISP2 ice core 

provide annual- and seasonal-scale proxy-temperature signals which 

suggest multiyear intervals of lowered temperatures in the early and 

mid-fourteenth century. The research synthesized here suggests that, 

while periods of unfavourable climatic fluctuations are likely to have 

played a role in the end of the Western Settlement, it was their 

cultural vulnerabilities to environmental change that left the Norse 

far more subject to disaster than their Inuit neighbours. Copyright 

1998, Institute for Scientific Information Inc.

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