Erika Weiberg

Uppsala University | UU ·  Department of Archaeology and Ancient History

Instances of resilience and persistence in ancient societies during periods of climate stress are necessary as counter weights to simplified collapse archaeology. The authors offer an evaluation of societal trajectories during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) in the Peloponnese against the backdrop of recently available local climate data. By considering...

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...

Human-environment dynamics in past societies has been a major field of research in the Mediterranean for a long time, but has grown significantly following the increase in the number and quality of palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental records in the last two decades. Here we sketch the outline of this field of research based on 1,531 author keywor...

Understanding the sustainability of land use systems over time requires an accounting of the diversity of land uses and their varying influences on the environment. Here we present a standardized review of land use systems in the Peloponnese, Greece, from the Neolithic to the Roman period (~6500 BC–AD 300). Using a combination of sources, we synthe...

We show that long-term and comparative studies are imperative if we are to identify the interlinkage between land use and climate and understand how vulnerabilities build over time and ultimately decide the societal outcomes of climate change. Using a long-term perspective, we study changes in both the extent and intensity of land use in NE Pelopon...

This study provides a high-resolution reconstruction of the vegetation of the Argive Plain (Peloponnese, Greece) covering 5000 years from the Early Bronze Age onwards. The well dated pollen record from ancient Lake Lerna has been interpreted in the light of archaeological and historical sources, climatic data from the same core and other regional p...

Dedline October 15th, 2022. Visit www.kielconference.uni-kiel.de to submit your abstracts! Human societies rely on agriculture for their subsistence. Yet farming is not one activity but includes a myriad of human practices from gardening to extensive field crop cultivation, from pasture farming to long-distance transhumance – and it leaves traces...

Climate change is a constant companion to human undertakings across time but the diversity of human responses calls for contextual approaches. In the present chapter, we turn to the Late Bronze Age of the Peloponnese, Greece, comparing fluctuations between wet and dry climate conditions with equally fluctuating levels of socio-political integration...

In this study, we present a modeling approach that investigates how much cultivable land was required to supply a society and whether societies were in need when environmental conditions deteriorated. The approach is implemented for the North-Eastern Peloponnese and is based upon the location of Late Helladic IIIB (1300–1200 BCE) archaeological sit...

The use of archaeological survey data for evaluation of landscape dynamics has commonly been concerned with the distribution of settlements and changes in number of recorded sites over time. Here we present a new quantitative approach to survey-based legacy data, which allows further assessments of the spatial configuration of possible land-use are...

This research aims to improve the knowledge of the mid to late Holocene climate changes and the underlying drivers in the eastern Mediterranean. We focus on the Peloponnese peninsula, SW Greece, characterized by a W-E rainfall/temperature gradient and a strong climate-sensitivity to shifts in the large-scale atmospheric patterns. A radiocarbon-date...

Throughout his career, Paul Sinclair has encouraged students to pursue a concerned archaeology that goes beyond establishing cultural chronologies to formulating critical inquiries fundamental to our world and for our future. This book honours his achievements by exploring urbanism, resilience and livelihoods, contacts and trade, and heritage and l...

Quantitative reconstructions of past land use facilitate comparisons between livelihoods in space and time. However, comparison between different types of land use strategies is challenging as land use has a multitude of expressions and intensities. The quantitative method presented here facilitates the exploration and synthetization of uneven arch...

Late Early Bronze Age (EB IIB–III, 2500–2000 bc ) evidence from the northeast Peloponnese and central Crete present two coeval sequences of events with very different societal outcomes. By drawing on resilience theory and the model of adaptive cycles, this article explores when and why the paths of mainland Greece and Crete diverged around 2200 bc...

The conference is a collaborative effort among members of the PELOPS (Past Environments and Landscapes of Peloponnesian Societies) group, which is an interdisciplinary group of scholars with an ongoing engagement in human-environment interaction in the Peloponnese from archaeology, history, environmental and climate reconstructions. The primary ai...

Published archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and palaeoclimatic data from the Peloponnese in Greece are compiled, discussed and evaluated in order to analyse the interactions between humans and the environment over the last 9000 years. Our study indicates that the number of human settlements found scattered over the peninsula have quadrupled from...

This paper reviews the methodological and practical issues relevant to the ways in which natural scientists, historians and archaeologists may collaborate in the study of past climatic changes in the Mediterranean basin. We begin by discussing the methodologies of these three disciplines in the context of the consilience debate, that is, attempts t...

Lerna and the Lower Citadel of Tiryns are key sites for understanding the Early Helladic II-III transition in the northeastern Peloponnese. We argue that the differences between the two settlements do not reflect chronological variation, but rather the ways in which each settlement responded to events ca. 2200 b.c. The ceramic and architectural seq...

The centuries surrounding 2200 B.C.E. (the year commonly used to mark the transition between the second and third phases of the Early Bronze Age) were transformative times in the Aegean. At some locations, development continued and accelerated; in many places, however, several societal characteristics and supraregional traits seem to have been aban...

The point of departure for this paper is the publication of two Early Helladic sealing fragments from the coastal settlement of Asine on the north-east Peloponnese in Greece. After an initial description and discussion they are set in the context of sealing custom established on the Greek mainland around 2500 BCE. In the first part of the paper foc...