RISE: Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Bronze Age Waterfront Communities (2200–800 BC)

Exploring how communities coped with climate change is crucial for a deeper understanding of vulnerability and resilience in the past and present. This project will explore responses to climate change effects on waterfront settlements during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Circum-Alpine space. A major focus is on how cultural diversities influenced social resilience capacities to lake level rises. This will be achieved by employing a new socio-spatial approach to climate change archaeology for analysing the rich, but in this respect understudied submerged settlements of the Alpine space (UNESCO World Heritage since 2011).Rising water levels due to global warming are amongst the biggest challenges of our time Throughout history effects of climate change on the hydrology of landscapes have repeatedly threatened settlement areas but we still know little about different social forms of coping. Here the archaeology of submerged prehistoric sites can offer a unique long-term perspective on the cultural diversities of climate change resilience in shore areas around the world. In Central Europe, ‘prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps’ provide ideal case studies thanks to their exceptional preservation and rich archaeological and paleoenvironmental research. They bear evidence that settlement communities were living at lakeshores for more than 3500 years. Throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age (c. 5000-500 BC) they were facing recurring seasonal and climate-induced lake level changes threating to submerge their settlement spaces. While failed settlement attempts and settlement interruptions indicate their vulnerability, architectural measures, spatial mobility, and the recurring re-occupation of the shores speak for the communities’ resilience. In parallel to climate, socio-political and economic causes must be factored in. Despite the abundance of research and data on these sites, the settlements’ resilience and vulnerabilities have never been researched directly and are thus poorly understood. The overall objective of this project is to explore how Bronze Age (2200-800 BC) settlement communities responded to recurring seasonal and longer-termed climate-driven lake level changes. The specific aims are: a.) to correlate different climate fluctuations to changing settlement activities and dwelling practices in different wetlandscapes around the Alps (lakes of the northern and southern Alpine Foreland) and b.) to understand how the respective climatic, environmental, and cultural contexts led to specific vulnerabilities recognizable through materialities of risk reduction, protective measures, and settlement abandonment. c.) By adopting a diachronic perspective, the social resilience capacities of settlement communities will be revealed. These aims will be achieved by using a newly elaborated social archaeological methodology for climate change archaeology in contrast to most widely used environmental approaches. The chosen socio-spatial theoretical focus on ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ will re-centre agency and social practice in human-environmental relations to omit climate determinism and monocausal explanations. The methodology combines qualitative and quantitative approaches from archaeology (architecture studies, settlement biographies, settlement frequencies and densities using GIS, network analyses) and climate sciences (sedimentological coring, time series statistics). Existing bioarchaeological and environmental data will be taken from literature and included for modelling. The outcomes of this project’s synthesis are that for the first time, all lakeshore settlement layouts of the Bronze Age in the Circum-Alpine region are compiled, comparatively evaluated, and correlated with climatic and hydrological data. This, and the adoption of a cross-cultural, long-term comparative perspective assures the generation of new insights to prehistoric social climate change resilience in changing environments. Archaeological research on climate change will be interdisciplinarity linked to disaster/risk management studies thus contributing to the emerging interdisciplinary field of vulnerability, resilience, and climate change research of today.