MOVE – Cultural Transformations and Spatial Mobility as Resilience Capacity of Lakeshore Settlement Communities at the end of the 4th Millennium BC.

Hafner, Albert; Heitz, Caroline Franziska (16 March 2023). MOVE – Cultural Transformations and Spatial Mobility as Resilience Capacity of Lakeshore Settlement Communities at the end of the 4th Millennium BC. (Unpublished). In: Kiel Conference Scales of Social, Environmental & Cultural Change in Past Societies. Kiel. 16.03.2023.

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Understanding change in early societies is a longstanding key question in Prehistoric Archaeology, but the decisive parameters of societal vulnerability and resilience are still poorly understood. In the northern Alpine Foreland, one of the most striking societal transformations of the Late Neolithic occurred at the beginning of the second half of the 4th millennium BCE: the emergence of the «Horgen» cultural sphere – named after its enigmatic coarse pottery – dating from between 3400 and 2800 BCE. Numerous outstandingly preserved dendro-dated Neolithic lakeshore settlements provide a promising source material to study the phenomenon. The SNSF research project MOVE (2021–2024) aims to gain a deeper understanding of the formation as well as the end of the «Horgen» cultural sphere and its environmental and societal conditions. Our pilot study conducted for the time around 3400 BCE shows that at the beginning of the respective cultural transformation coincides with a climatic deterioration that led to rising lake-levels. They destroyed former settlement areas on the lakeshores and led to temporal interruptions of settlement activities. By using archaeological information on settlement features as well as various global and regional paleoclimatic proxy data we inferred that especially the longerterm lake-level rises of higher magnitudes hit the agricultural communities hard but did not lead to any form of social collapse. On the contrary, the immediate repopulation of the lakeshores after the lake floods suggests that spatial mobility and the temporary relocation of settlements to the hinterland were a successful social coping practice in dealing with these challenges. For more on this see: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/197383

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