! BY-NC AJA Open Access BOOK REVIEW Reviewed by Guy D. Middleton April 2017 (121.2) Climate and Ancient Societies Edited by Susanne Kerner, Rachael J. Dann, and Pernille Bangsgaard. Pp. 351, figs. 81, tables 11. Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen 2015. $52. ISBN 978-87-635-4199-2 (cloth). Climate and Ancient Societies is a wide-ranging contribution to the discourse on ancient climate change and the responses of (mostly) prehistoric communities and societies to it, containing papers from a workshop held in Denmark in 2009. The editors situate the book as a contribution to contemporary debates on climate change and environmental problems; they argue that archaeology is relevant to the present and future and has, with its longue durée perspectives, “much to bring to the table” (24). The book is divided into four parts, covering Holocene climate reconstruction, complex society’s responses to climatic variation, archaeological evidence for pollution and its ecological implications, and stable isotope analysis in the Middle East. Most of the 15 chapters consider the Near East and eastern Mediterranean, but two focus on Denmark. In terms of chronological coverage, the volume focus ranges from the Danish Late Paleolithic/Mesolithic (12,500–6,500 B.C.E.) and the 8.2 ka BP climate event to Old Kingdom Egypt, northern Mesopotamia (in Akkadian times), and the eastern Mediterranean ca. 1200 B.C.E., for which there is some textual evidence. It is not possible to review each of the papers here, but some comments can be made on a selection of them and some of the points they raise. The issue of chronology, the dating of climate “events” or “shifts,” is a perennial difficulty in this field, as is tying them to social change. Roberts’ paper on Holocene climate change in the eastern Mediterranean, for instance, contains important warnings about identifying coincidence between climate changes and social change and slipping into environmentally deterministic “explanations.” He rightly suggests that nonenvironmental factors “were at least as important” in driving change (35). He also rightly emphasizes that many societies did not collapse due to climate change and that we can learn from these; societal responses to climate change were not predetermined, and collapse was not an inevitable result. The matter of chronology, social and political change, and collapse ca. 2150 B.C.E. is also a theme of Bárta’s contribution on the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. This collapse has been characterized as abrupt and caused by climate change and a reduced Nile. He uses beetles from Abusir to argue that aridification began almost two centuries before the end of the Old Kingdom, with the spread of desert conditions and the shrinking of the Abusir lake and increased salinity on its shores (182–83). In addition, he notes structural changes to the Old Kingdom polity, with an increase in the relative power and wealth of local and regional elites, which weakened central authority (183–86). The latter may have been an adaptation to changing environmental circumstances (178). He sees these changes as coincident and draws the conclusion that the eventual demise of the Old Kingdom was brought about by these long-term processes. Building on the idea of varied responses to climate change, Ur examines the case of Early Bronze Age northern Mesopotamia ca. 2220 B.C.E., where climate change has been linked with drastic change in settlement and population and with the collapse of the Akkadian empire. He focuses on three cities: Hamoukar, Tell Brak, and Tell Leilan. As he demonstrates, there was no simple collapse, no single response to climate change in the region—each city had its own trajectory. Hamoukar remained populated and wealthy after 2200 B.C.E., and when it was later destroyed abruptly and violently, the “immediate cause was social rather than environmental” (79). Tell Brak seems to have decreased in size and status with the Climate and Ancient Societies | American Journal of Archaeology https://www.ajaonline.org/book-review/3425 1 of 3 02/04/2017, 06:45