Climate Change and Farming Response in a Temperate Oceanic Zone—the Exploitation of a Karstic Region in Western Ireland in the Third and Second Millennia BC

Abstract

This article explores the start and end of a period of intensive farming in a karstic region on the west coast of Ireland in the late third and early second millennia BC in relation to episodes of climate change. Human responses to climate change in prehistory have been most frequently studied in regions prone to aridity and drought such as the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean where past climate shifts may have had more extreme effects and are likely to have left strong proxy signals. It is these same regions where early complex societies were located and the collapse or reorganization of these large complex societies can leave similarly strong traces in the archaeological record. In contrast, the present study is focused on the west coast of Ireland, an Atlantic island in a temperate oceanic climate region at a time when the societies living there are best described as small-scale segmentary societies. Geography therefore militated against the most extreme effects of climate change and there were no large complex societies to collapse; nevertheless there is evidence that climate change impacted these societies.

Keywords:

• human response to climate change
• oceanic climate
• Atlantic
• Chalcolithic
• Bronze Age

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Angela Gallagher for Figures 1, 2, and 4 and to Noel McCarthy for Figure 3 and an earlier version of Figure 5. Many thanks also to Prof. Paula Reimer, Director of the Chrono Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, for guidance on the reporting of the isotope measurements related to the radiocarbon dates. Thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft whose comments improved the text. Particular thanks to an anonymous donation to the Archaeology Department at NUI Galway and to the Royal Irish Academy for funding the radiocarbon dates.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.