Climate and societal change in the western Mediterranean area around 4.2 ka BP

In the eastern Mediterranean area, coherent patterns and synchronous events around 4.2 kaBP suggest an obvious link between cultural upheaval in urban societies and climate forcing. Here, the 4.2 kaBP aridification event is thought the cause of severe economic consequences and social unrest. The picture for the central and western Mediterranean regions, at the interface of North Atlantic (Bond event 3) and monsoon-influenced climate, is different. It remains unclear whether supra-regional drought around 4.2 ka BP extended into the western Mediterranean. Yet contemporaneous pre-urban societies, already marked by emerging complexity, were in profound upheaval during their transition from Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age ideologies. An array of abrupt cultural transitions, precisely dating to 4.2 kaBP, include widespread “crises” of Mediterranean Bell Beaker populations, the transitions from Pre-palace to Palace cultures on the Greek Islands, the transition from Los Millares Culture to El Argar Culture in the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula. The possibility that these transitions may have been responses/resilience strategies to abrupt climate change has so far hardly been considered.

Here we trace patterns of socio-environmental crisis using pertinent proxy records of seasonality, population density, subsistence, and settlement patterns from existing and new archaeological and climate archives.