300 years of rapid cultural and climatic changes at annual resolution: The Middle Bronze Age pile-dwelling ‘gap’ and the Löbben Cold Period (1750–1450 BCE)

Prehistoric ‘pile dwellings’ have been discovered in numerous bogs and lakes around the European Alps (UNESCO World Heritage 2011) and provide a unique long-term perspective on the resilience and vulnerabilities of waterfront communities to climate change. Their construction histories can be dated to the exact calendar year using dendrochronology. In this paper, we explore a rapid change in Bronze Age societies that coincided with a period of rapid glacier advances and retreats. While lake shores were populated in the northern Alpine Foreland during the Early and the Late Bronze Age, during the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1480–1190 BCE) there was an apparent absence of ‘pile dwellings’ lasting more than 290 years. The reason for this shift in in settlement activity is still debated. One long-standing hypothesis states that a cold climate led to rising lake levels and rendered former lake shore settlement areas uninhabitable. However, the relations between climatic changes, lake levels and lake shore settlements are still poorly understood. For the first time, we apply a socio-archaeological mixed methods approach from archaeology and micromorphology, including time series statistics on annually-resolved archaeological and paleoclimatic proxy data, to tackle these questions in the scope of the SNSF research project ‘RISE: Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Waterfront Communities (2200–800 BCE)’.