Application of a Global Volcanicity Time-Series on High-Resolution Paleoclimatic Modeling of the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

In order to understand adaptation to climate change it is first necessary to set that change within human temporal and geographic dimensions. As Halstead and O’Shea (1989:1) phrase it: “human communities have developed an impressive array of cultural mechanisms for buffering variability. The diversity of these mechanisms, however, should not mask the fact that an effective strategy must match, in both capacity and scale, the variability with which it is to cope.” Winterhalder (1980) suggests that a population’s adaptive flexibility will not be fully realized if the environment is dynamic in ways not anticipated by analysts. He adds (1980:139) that the “assumption that environments are stable, or that change is either very gradual or abruptly cataclysmic, leads to the reverse of [this] problem: the failure to examine environmental sources of causation when rapid changes are recorded in historical or archaeological records?’ These passages suggest that if meaningful results are to be derived from studies of the interaction between land-use strategies and climate, human responses to the specifics of climate change (e.g. responses to changes in the reliability, magnitude, seasonality, or frequency of rainfall) rather than to climate change in general should be addressed. This concern relates directly to both the temporal and geographic resolution of paleoclimatic models regardless of the cultural group or time period of interest.