Abstract
This paper deals with prehistoric communities at the end of the 3rd millennium BC in Northwest Europe in relation to the 4.2 ka BP climatic event. In particular, the question of the resilience of these communities to climatic change will be studied here by comparing various climatic records and analysing specific archaeological parameters for social and cultural change. These parameters include the duration and intensity of settlement occupation, the variability of subsistence activities (e.g. cereal cultivation, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and gathering) and the connectedness of communities within exchange networks. Rather than answering the often-asked yes/no question with regard to human–environment relations, our research asks what effect resulted from the 4.2 ka BP climatic event, and, from the perspective of resilience, how did communities adopt to these changes in their practices and cultural choices during the later 3rd millennium BC.In short, we maintain that climate change took place at the end of the 3rd millennium BC, but the changes in humidity and temperature with their effects on vegetation were probably regionally varied across Northwest Europe. We also observe that the studied communities developed differently during the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. On the one hand, we identify new food storage and house building techniques in the Low Countries and Schleswig-Holstein and, on the other hand, substantiate population decrease on the Orkney Islands around 2300 BC. Finally, we note a development of the Bell Beaker phenomenon into an Early Bronze Age maritory of connected communities across the North Sea, in which these communities expressed their resilience to climate change.
Highlights
From ca. 2600 BC onwards, prehistoric communities in Western and Central Europe exhibit large similarities in funerary practices and material culture, often labelled as the ‘Bell Beaker phenomenon’ (e.g. Vander Linden 2013)
In order to move this discussion forward, and to provide a different perspective, we focus on the resilience of Late Neolithic communities in Northwest Europe to climate change
In order to see what effect these mechanisms had closer to the prehistoric communities in Northwest Europe, we look at several cores with high-resolution, taken from sediments in closer proximity to the environments in which human societies lived during the 3rd millennium BC
Summary
From ca. 2600 BC onwards, prehistoric communities in Western and Central Europe exhibit large similarities in funerary practices and material culture, often labelled as the ‘Bell Beaker phenomenon’ (e.g. Vander Linden 2013). An abrupt climatic event, commonly known as the ‘4.2 ka BP event’, had a well-attested influence on human society in large parts of the world This particular climatic event was identified in North Atlantic marine sediments in the 1990s (Bond et al 2001)—recently in the North Atlantic (Bradley and Bakke 2019)—and has been related for a long time to large scale social changes in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Near East and Southeast Asia (Walker et al 2018, 217). In these particular regions of the world, this climatic event lasted from 4400 to 3850 BP This latter effect of climate change, a major socio-cultural transformation, was nuanced recently by Cookson et al (2019), who see both continuity in the occupation of certain sites as well as the effects of climate change on agricultural practices around 2250 BCE
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