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January 19, 2008
Of Snails, Archaeology, and Climate
I always read what Aydin Örstan at Snail's Tales suggests. Well, maybe not always, but I do read his suggestions when his abnormal interests seem to align with my abnormal interests. Yesterday he directed his readers to the Archaeo+Malacology Group Newsletter No. 12. What struck me was a paper by Henk Mienis titled "Molluscs from two soil samples taken at Horbat Hammim, Israel." Mienis studied two mollusk bearing samples from this Early Bronze Age I-A site. Mienis concludes,
All the gastropods are common land snails, which still live in the vicinity of the site today. All these species are more or less characteristic of an environment with a Mediterranean climate and vegetation. If the nine gastropod species indeed represent an Early Bronze I-A terrestrial snail fauna, and are not later intrusions, then the climate prevailing during that period was probably hardly different from that of today.
Abnormally interesting. Sometime ago I was worrying about the usefulness of comparing the Ottoman Empire costs of olive oil in the Jerusalem market to the Late Bronze age costs of olive oil at Ugarit. I was really interested in cost fluctuations not actual costs. One of the concerns was uniformity of climate over time. Mienis' paper does not address this issue. I don't know enough (actually, I don't know anything) about the sensitivity of gastropods to climate change and therefore I can't determine how large a climate change window one should apply to the words "probably hardly different" in the paragraph I quoted above. And of course, as long as changes were not great enough to kill off one or more of the species the climate may have changed more than once between the Early Bronze Age and the present, it being only fortuitous that it is about the same now as it was then. In fact, that is exactly what one sees in the following cropped chart from Arie S. Issar's Climate Changes during the Holocene and their Impact on Hydrological Systems.
Note that, according to this chart, the climate in the Levant was "warm-dry" at the beginning of the Early Bronze period becoming "cold-humid" and returned to "warm-dry" before the period ended. Since then the climate has changed among these three designations several times and is "warm-dry" today. The easiest place to see the whole, uncropped, chart is in the extended excerpt of Issar's book.
References:
Posted by Duane Smith at January 19, 2008 2:22 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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Comments
Henk Mienis is talking about the local climate of one particular spot, whereas Issar's chart is for the overall climate of the entire Levant. I would expect climatic differences between different locations. And also, one shouldn't read too much into a single collection of snail shells. (I don't mean that Henk isn't being careful.) But I agree with you that it's indeed abnormally interesting.
Posted by: Aydin at January 21, 2008 8:01 AM
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