Byzantine Anatolia: a ‘laboratory’ for the study of climate impacts and socio-environmental relations in the past (original) (raw)

2014, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xlv:2 (Autumn, 2014), 113–161.

This article, which is part of a larger project, examines cases in which high-resolution archaeological, textual, and environmental data can be integrated with longer-term, low resolution data to afford greater precision in identifying some of the causal relationships underlying societal change. The issue of howenvironmental, especially climatic, disruptions affect human societies and political systems has begun to attract a great deal of attention from the scientiªc community and the general public. Recent studies suggest that one possible result of certain climatic events is an increase in violence over contested resources—a conclusion that has significant consequences for, at least, policymakers, investment bankers, insurance companies, and the military.