Coping with the Cold – Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Communities during the 3.7 ka 'Löbben' Glacier Advance (ca. 1900–1450 BCE)

Abstract

Exploring how waterfront communities coped with floods and long-term lake level changes in the prehistoric past is crucial for a deeper understanding of vulnerabilities and resilience capabilities to climate-driven hydrological hazards in the present and future. In this paper, we explore responses to climate change effects of lakeshore settlement communities (UNESCO World Heritage pile dwellings) in the Alpine region. The archaeological settlement data is unique in terms of its high temporal resolution (annual to decadal scale) thanks to dendrochronological dating. While lake shores were populated in the northern Alpine Foreland during the Early Bronze Age, there is a lack of settlements in the Middle Bronze Age between the 15th and the 13/12th c. BC – or ca. 1480 and 1190 BCE as the dendrochronologically dated sites show. The reason for this absence of pile dwellings is an ongoing debate in research. While a research gap can be excluded, unfavorable preservation conditions or hiatuses in the stratigraphies at the lake shores should be further checked as possible reasons. Furthermore, this ca. 250 yearlong ‘settlement gap’ correlates with the dendro-dated high stands of Alpine glaciers during the Löbben Advance Period (LAP), a cold period that might have led to changed hydrology of the lakes. A long-standing hypothesis states that cold climate led to rising lake levels that rendered former lake shore settlement areas uninhabitable. However, the relations between climatic changes, lake levels and lake shore settlements are still poorly understood. To omit pitfalls of environmental determinism and to critically assess the narrative of the causal influence of climatic variability, we apply a socio-archeological mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods from archaeology and micromorphology with time series statistics on temporally highly resolved archaeological and paleoclimatic proxy data. With this methodology, we aim at gaining a deeper understanding of communal responses towards hydrological hazards related to climatic changes in the scope of the SNSF research project “RISE: Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Waterfront Communities (2200-800 BCE)”.