Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Waterfront Communities in the Circum-Alpine space (4000-800 BCE)

Heitz, Caroline Franziska (11 March 2022). Climate Change Resilience and Vulnerabilities of Waterfront Communities in the Circum-Alpine space (4000-800 BCE) (Unpublished). In: MCH seminar, Arhuus University.

Exploring how communities coped with climate change is crucial for a deeper understanding of vulnerability and resilience in the past and present. In this paper I will examine responses to climate change effects on waterfront settlements during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in the Circum-Alpine space using high temporal resolution data from the UNESCO World Heritage pile dwellings. Rising lake levels repeatedly rendered former lakeshore settlement areas uninhabitable and led to temporary interruptions of local settlement activities. To critically examine the narrative of the causal influence of climatic variability, archaeological information on settlement features as well as various global and regional paleoclimatic proxy data will be correlated utilizing qualitative methods and inferential statistics. First results show that Late Neolithic settlements were resistant to seasonal flooding but vulnerable to longer-term lake level rises of higher magnitudes. Settlement communities as such, however, where resilient to both, as spatial mobility and translocal socio-spatial configurations were an inherent part of their way of life. For the Bronze Age, however, these interrelationships are still poorly understood and hold great potential for future research.

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