UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Debates about the general LBA climate

Specialists have debated the nature of the general climate during the opening centuries of the LBA, 1900-1700calBC. One deeply ingrained position is that sedentarization in the early LBA resulted from an amelioration of climate that encouraged the widespread adoption of agriculture. Past evidence of this moister period was based on interpretations of soil conditions in undated soil columns (Ivanov and Vasiliev 1995). Recently, Russian palynologists (Kremenetski 2002) have conducted palynological studies in the Buzuluk forest (1000 km²) in the eastern Samara Oblast. Based on his 1999 palynological studies, the following environmental and climatic sequence has been suggested by Kremenetskii:

Table 3

The arid climate phase 2,500-1,500 BC noted by Kremenetskii at Buzuluk has been recorded in many regions of Eastern Europe, Western Siberia, and Kazakhstan (Kremenetski 2002; Kremenetski et al. 1997; Velichko et al. 1997). This late MBA/early LBA arid phase in the pollen record contradicts with previously held notions that the climate was moister in the early LBA, and that a moister climate encouraged agriculture and sedentarization. Moreover, Chernykh (1997:79) has argued that all of the supposed evidence for agriculture in LBA settlements east of the Don can be attributed to activities unrelated to agriculture, and suggested instead that Late Bronze Age groups of the Volga-Ural region were settled stock-breeders who relied on little or no agricultural products. Our data supports Chernykh in this debate.