Abstract:

Despite their apparent ubiquity today, archaeologists have seldom focused explicitly on crises. The authors in this book take up the challenge of doing so, drawing on archaeological cases from a wide temporal and spatial range. In addition to identifying crises, the contributions search for the factors that underlie them. These range from climate to disease, environmental destruction, sudden natural events such as volcanic eruptions, and intra- or intersocietal conflicts.

Factors are often intertwined in complex ways that lead to emergent properties and that can neither be attributable solely to anthropogenic nor to natural causes. Coping with crises include rearrangements of ways of life, such as increasing or decreasing mobility, the use of alternative (‘second-choice’) food sources, recourse to intensified or newly developed rituals, demise of old institutions and/or the building of new ones, and small-scale acts of subversion.

This book is the fifth volume of a series published by the German-Iranian research cooperation “The Iranian Highlands: Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies”. The goal of the research project is to shine a new light on communities and societies that populated the Iranian highlands and their more or less successful strategies to cope with the many vagaries, the constant changes and risks of their natural and humanly shaped environments.

Contents

Crises – An Introduction
Reinhard Bernbeck, Susan Pollock, and Martin Kehl

Characterising crises

Crises of Our Own Making: Finding a Way Out of the Resilience Myth for Archaeology
Matthew C. Reilly

Are Archaeologists Crisis-philic? Exploring the Nexus of Climate Change and Migration
Sepideh Maziar

Politics, religion, and crises

How did the Elamites Cope with Crises? Looking at the Gap between the Middle and the Neo-Elamite Period
Rafiei-Alavi

Is This Burning an Eternal Flame? Political Crises and Dynastic Cults in Southwest Asia during Early Antiquity
Michael Brown

Death at the beginning of life. Medieval and early modern infant burial as response to multiple crises and what we can learn from it today
Barbara Hausmair

Environment and Crises

Climate and Crises: Towards an Eventful and Punctuated Prehistory
Felix Riede

Dehqaed’s Natural Crises and the Challenge of Flooding
Zohreh Zehbari

Fending off Crises with Porosity: Sand, Water and Wind in the Helmand Basin
Moslem Mishmastnehi and Reinhard Bernbeck

Resources, technology, and crisis

Probing Criticality: Sliding Scales of Crisis in Two Highland Societies
Reinhard Bernbeck, Susan Pollock, and Jana Eger

On the Edge of Crisis – A View from Archaeometry
Kristina A Franke

Metal and Crisis: Crisis Phenomena in the Production, Distribution and Utilisation of Copper and Other Metals Between the 4th and the Late 2nd Millennium BCE in West Asia
Thomas Stöllner

No Risk, No Neolithisation
Judith Thomalsky and Akbar Abedi