Premium
Basic Instabilities? Climate and Culture in the Negev over the Long Term
Author(s) -
Rosen Steven A.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
geoarchaeology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.696
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1520-6548
pISSN - 0883-6353
DOI - 10.1002/gea.21572
Subject(s) - subsistence agriculture , geography , desert (philosophy) , economic geography , climate change , human settlement , settlement (finance) , term (time) , geographic variation , physical geography , ecology , demography , population , sociology , archaeology , political science , physics , quantum mechanics , world wide web , computer science , law , payment , biology , agriculture
Settlement systems in the Negev, Israel's southern desert, over the past 15,000 years show cycles of demographic rise and decline. Examining site frequency graphs based on systematic survey of 100 km 2 grids in different areas and at different geographic scales, these demographic cycles should be tied to patterns of geographic expansions and contractions deriving from different culture‐geographic sources. Together this variability suggests instabilities in basic social geographic structures, undoubtedly to be tied at some fundamental level to the difficulties of subsistence in the environmentally harsh desert. On the other hand, if the general pattern of cycles or fluctuations should be tied to some essential property of desert adaptation, the specific incidents of expansion and florescence followed by contraction and decline should be tied to historically particularistic episodes of climatic fluctuation, cumulative technological change, internal social and demographic trends, and inputs from societies on the desert periphery, ostensibly the sedentary core zones. Finally, if these patterns are examined at larger chronological and geographical scales, clear patterns of long‐term continuity emerge, belying the idea of essential cultural instability.