Social and Environmental Dynamics in Bronze and Iron Age Greece

The authors present an overview of cultural and social resilience during more than two thousand years of fluctuating environmental circumstances in the Greek Bronze and Iron Ages. Central for discussions are four case studies focusing on discontinuities during periods of heightened societal stress combined with suggested climatic or environmental instability. Topics under discussion are how past environmental changes and cultural responses interact. Attempts to reconstruct human sustainability in the light of shifting environmental circumstances should aim to establish a firm sequence of events. Other important factors are discrepancies and inadequacies of environmental and archaeological datasets in the Aegean, and intra-regional variation where small-scale environmental changes have affected even neighbouring valley systems in different ways. Human decision-making and agency have been continually underestimated and under-explored, and the actual outcome of events after episodes or processes of environmental change lies in how they were perceived and dealt with by the people affected. All four case studies contain discussions on societal complexity, whether waxing or waning, and overexploitation with resulting degradation of lands is a factor for three of the four case studies. A significant change around 2200 and 1100 BCE is the disappearance on a supra-regional scale of common features in material culture, and the shift to regionalism and small-scale life, while a reverse development can be seen around 1600 BCE and 700 BCE.