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August 24, 2008
Climate, Agriculture and the Fate of Nations
I've been prowling around ABZU and found an open access journal, Climate of the Past, that may align with some of your abnormal interests. It does touch on some of mine. The paper that struck me, and frankly, the only paper that struck me, was "Agricultural sustainability in the semi-arid Near East" (3, 193–203, 2007) by Frank Hole of the Department of Anthropology at Yale. The paper discusses the Khabur Basin of northeastern Syria primarily. Here's a sample,
The Late Bronze Age (1600–1200 BC) saw northern Syria become a battle ground where empires contested (Akkermans and Schwartz, 2003). For some two centuries, the Khabur was the heartland of the Mitannian state, whose principal remains are palaces atop several of the existing abandoned mound sites. Around 1200 BC the urban centers and political systems of the region again collapsed. While causes are not clear and environmental degradation has been invoked, it seems likely that a combination of climate changes (Neumann and Parpola, 1987), constant warfare and destruction of sites by burning (Akkermans and Schwartz, 2003:359), may have made life itself, let alone agriculture, unsustainable.
The paper is quite interesting. Hole discusses climate and the effects of climate changes from 9000 BCE (the end of the Younger Dryas) to the modern era and provides a few observations on sustainability of the current agricultural active in the Khabur Basin. For those who don't like reading this kind of paper, there are lots of pictures and graphs to ponder.
Posted by Duane Smith at August 24, 2008 8:11 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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Comments
Thanks for the link. I will check out that journal.
Posted by: Aydin at August 25, 2008 4:18 PM
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