Alessio Palmisano

Università degli Studi di Torino | UNITO · Dipartimento di Studi Storici

This paper investigates and offers explanations for the distribution of specific products (ivory and lapis lazuli artefacts, “Syrian” bottles) and technologies (metrology) that have often been invoked as tracers of long-distance trade contacts and/or political units in Anatolia, northern Levant and northern Mesopotamia during the Early and Middle B...

From the mid-20th century onwards, consolidated study of the merchant archives from the Old Assyrian trading colony at Kaneš (Kültepe) has not only transformed our understanding of the social, economic and political dynamics of the Bronze Age Near East, but also overturned many preconceived notions of what constitutes pre-modern trade. Despite this...

This paper illustrates long-term trends in human population and climate from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (14,000–2500 cal. yr. BP) in order to assess to what degree climate change impacted human societies in the Near East. It draws on a large corpus of archaeo-demographic data, including anthropogenic radiocarbon dates (n = 10,653) an...

The Italian peninsula offers an excellent case study within which to investigate long- term regional demographic trends and their response to climate fluctuations, espe- cially given its diverse landscapes, latitudinal range and varied elevations. In the past two decades, summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates have becom...

The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future1–3. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time4,5. Here we synthesized resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric population time–frequency data, span...

The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time. We present results of the first attempt to synthesise resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric populati...

In the broader context of prehistoric archaeology, settlement archaeology represents one of the most pivotal fields of research. The investigation of settlement structures, patterns and organization has developed into a field in which multiscale approaches are widely applied. Settlement structures, on the intra-site scale, and patterns, on the inte...

The Central Mediterranean represented a key area within the vast and unprecedented exchange network that defines the Mediterranean in the second part of the 2nd mill BC and that apparently ended around 1200 BC. To what extent the 3.2 Ka BP event-if so-impact on the Central Mediterranean Late Bronze Age communities? Is it possible to detect adaptive...

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of uncalibrated radiocarbon dates for the whole Near East from the Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene (15,000 – 1,500 cal. yr. BP). It is composed of 11,027 radiocarbon dates from 1,023 sites that have been collected comprehensively by cross-checking...

Archaeologists increasingly use large radiocarbon databases to model prehistoric human demography (also termed paleo-demography). Numerous independent projects, funded over the past decade, have assembled such databases from multiple regions of the world. These data provide unprecedented potential for comparative research on human population ecolog...

For some time, archaeology and heritage have been experiencing a huge increase in the amount of available ‘’Open Science’’, in terms of digitized and born-digital data concerning human history and prehistory with all their contemporary legacies. This has been due to a combination of numerous research and cultural resource management initiatives, fo...

The rise and fall of ancient societies have been attributed to rapid climate change events. One of the most discussed of these is the 4.2kya event, a period of increased aridity and cooling posited as the cause of societal changes across the globe, including the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia. Studies seeking to correlate social and...

This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper wi...

Scaling methods have been applied to study modern urban areas and how they create accelerated, feedback growth in some systems while efficient use in others. For ancient cities, results have shown that cities act as social reactors that lead to positive feedback growth in socioeconomic measures. In this paper, we assess the relationship between set...

Abstract :This paper describes long-term changes in human population and vegetation cover in southern France, using summed radiocarbon probability distributions and site count data as population proxies and information from fossil pollen cores as a proxy for past land cover. Southern France is particularly wellsuited to this type of study as a resu...

Much attention has been placed on the drivers of vegetation change on the Iberian Peninsula. While climate plays a key role in determining the species pools within different regions and exerts a strong influence on broad vegetation patterning, the role of humans, particularly during prehistory, is less clear. The aim of this paper is to assess the...

This paper explores long-term trends in human population and vegetation change in the Levant from the early to the late Holocene in order to assess when and how human impact has shaped the region’s landscapes over the millennia. To do so, we employed multiple proxies and compared archaeological, pollen and palaeoclimate data within a multi-scalar a...

This paper introduces a special issue on The Changing Face of the Mediterranean: Land Cover, Demography, and Environmental Change, which brings together up-to-date regional or thematic perspectives on major long-term trends in Mediterranean human–environment relations. Particularly, important insights are provided by palynology to reconstruct past...

This paper offers a comparative study of land use and demographic development in northern and southern Greece from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Results from summed probability densities (SPD) of archaeological radiocarbon dates and settlement numbers derived from archaeological site surveys are combined with results from cluster-based ana...

This paper compares changes in vegetation structure and composition (using synthetic fossil pollen data) with proxy data for population levels (including settlements and radiocarbon dates) over the course of the last 10 millennia in Tyrrhenian central Italy. These data show generalised patterns of clearance of woodland in response both to early agr...

Southern Anatolia is a highly significant area within the Mediterranean, particularly in terms of understanding how agriculture moved into Europe from neighbouring regions. This study uses pollen, palaeoclimate and archaeological evidence to investigate the relationships between demography and vegetation change, and to explore how the development o...

The aim of this work is to reconstruct the periods of growth and decline of human populations in Morocco and their potential impacts on the landscape over the past 10,000 years. In order to estimate the trends in the human population size between 10,000 and 3000 years ago, we used a summed probability distribution (SPD) of radiocarbon dates from a...

As part of the Changing the Face of the Mediterranean Project, we consider how human pressure and concomitant erosion has affected a range of Mediterranean landscapes between the Neolithic and, in some cases, the post-medieval period. Part of this assessment comprises an investigation of relationships among palaeodemographic data, evidence for vege...

This synthesis paper offers a comparative perspective on how seven different Mediterranean regions, from Iberia and Morocco to the Levant, have been transformed by human and natural agencies during the past 10 millennia. It draws on a range of data sources: notably (1) archaeological site surveys (n = 32,000) and 14C dates (n = 12,000) as proxies f...

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of archaeological material culture data for Anatolia, northern Mesopotamia, and northern Levant during the Early and Middle Bronze Age (ca. 3,200 – 1,600 BC). Here we present four types of objects (lapis lazuli and ivory artefacts, Syrian bottles, and b...

Probability distributions are important tools for assessing the probability of the outcomes that occur. In particular, archaeologists have used the binomial and the Poisson distributions in order to model the likelihood of discrete archaeological phenomena. This section introduces these two methods and shows practical examples where they can be app...

"We thank Tosh et al. for their interest in our research but note that their analyses do not undermine the main findings of our article."

We review and evaluate human adaptations during the last glacial-interglacial climatic transition in southwest Asia. Stable isotope data imply that climatic change was synchronous across the region within the limits of dating uncertainty. Changes in vegetation, as indicated from pollen and charcoal, mirror step-wise shifts between cold-dry and warm...

To our knowledge, the dataset described in this paper represents the largest existing repository of archaeological settlement (7,383 sites) and radiocarbon data (816 samples) for central Italy, spanning the period from the Late Mesolithic (ca. 8,000 BC) to the fall of the Roman Empire (500 AD). This dataset is also one of the six case studies in a...

Significance Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? To address these long-standing questions, we constructed a database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years. Our an...

Raw counts of archaeological sites, estimates of changing settlement size and summed radiocarbon probability distributions have all become popular ways to investigate long-term regional trends in human population. Nevertheless, these three archaeological proxies have rarely been compared. This paper therefore explores the strengths and weaknesses o...

In this article, I adopt a long-established method known as rank-size analysis to detect particular settlement patterns in the Khabur Triangle (KT) and central Anatolia (CA) during the Middle Bronze Age. Archaeologists must be particularly careful when applying rank-size analysis to a given study area as the results can change at a different spatia...

This paper introduces an entropy maximization model to assess settlement systems in the Shahrizor plain. In the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, settlements in the Shahrizor plain are likely affected by a political situation in which the region transformed from being a central region of a small state to that which was a border zone between larger states....

We explore settlement structures and hierarchy found in different archaeological periods in northern, specifically the Khabur Triangle (KT), and southern Mesopotamia (SM) using a spatial interaction entropy maximization (SIEM) modeling and simulation method. Regional settlement patterns are investigated in order to understand what feedback levels f...

This paper highlights a spatial interaction entropy maximization (SIEM) model to reproduce and understand past human settlement hierarchy in Central Anatolia (CA) and the Khabur Triangle (KT) during theMiddle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1600 BC). We propose applying SIEM to understand which sites and areas would have become prominent in this period by usi...

From the mid-20th century onwards, consolidated study of the merchant archives from the Old Assyrian trading colony at Kaneš (Kültepe) has not only transformed our understanding of the social, economic and political dynamics of the Bronze Age Near East, but also overturned many preconceived notions of what constitutes pre-modern trade. Despite this...

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans...

We present a spatial interaction entropy maximizing and structural dynamics model of settlements from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) and Iron Ages (IA) in the Khabur Triangle (KT) region within Syria. The model addresses factors that make locations attractive for trade and settlement, affecting settlement growth and change. We explore why some sites b...

The present paper aims to offer an overview of the existing statistical approaches to settlement patterning in Archaeology by one multi-scalar method (Ripley’s K function) and to show both problems and potentiality of such technique dealing with spatial data. I will use as case study the Iron Age I period archaeological sites located in the actual...

The dataset provides the diachronic and spatial distribution of Khabur ware in upper Mesopotamia and central Anatolia in the early second millennium BC (ca. 1900-1750 BC) by evaluating the ceramic evidence coming from excavated archaeological sites. Khabur ware is wheel-made pottery with monochrome geometric painted decoration in red, brown or blac...