Climate Fluctuations and Settlement Dynamics in the Northern Alpine Foreland (3950–3200 BCE)

Laabs, Julian; Heitz, Caroline Franziska (15 March 2024). Climate Fluctuations and Settlement Dynamics in the Northern Alpine Foreland (3950–3200 BCE) (Unpublished). In: The Hofheim Experiment: Understanding Michelsberg Liveways And Dynamics Through An Integrated Approach. 14.03.-15.03.2024.

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Since the dendrochronological revolution, we know that Neolithic lake and wetland settlements in the Northern Alpine Foreland were short-lived and their communities highly mobile. This was not in keeping with the expectations of sedentary agriculturalists in other regions or earlier periods of prehistoric Europe. Over time it became clear that the transience and mobility of lakeshore settlement communities was not forcefully only driven by climatic fluctuations, but first and foremost by sophisticated socio-economic forms of organization. However, the intensity of lakeshore settlements varied over time. Early on, it was suggested that climatic changes in environmental conditions – namely lake levels – led to the abandonment and re-settling of the settlement locations situated at the lakeshores. This hypothesis still needs further evaluation.

In this presentation we examine a dataset of dendrochronologically dated lakeshore settlements in the northern Alpine foreland and to test if climatic fluctuations were a central driving force to settlement dynamics. On the basis of a yearly precise sequence of contemporaneous lakeshore settlements, correlations with a number of climate proxies can be tested and interpreted. We put special emphasis on the first half of the 4th millennium BCE, as this is the initial phase of the so-called ‘lake-dwelling Neolithic’ in the Circum Alpine region and corresponds to the Michelsberg Culture. Preliminary results suggest correlations between climatic fluctuations and the (re-)settling and abandonment of lake shores in the Three-Lakes Region of western Switzerland and beyond. With our data, we aim to explore the resilience of local ‘wetland communities’ to changing climates and environments through their mobile lifestyles, and possible impulses for extending models of settlement dynamics in other regions and time periods.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	10 Strategic Research Centers > Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR) 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of History and Archaeology > Institute of Archaeological Sciences > Pre- and Early History
UniBE Contributor:	Laabs, Julian, Heitz, Caroline Franziska
Subjects:	900 History > 930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499)
Language:	Multilingual
Submitter:	Caroline Franziska Heitz
Date Deposited:	14 Mar 2024 12:22
Last Modified:	14 Mar 2024 12:22
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/194080