CLIMA (mutazioni del) E CIVILTA' (livello di)

Abrupt climate change 

may have 

rocked the cradle of civilization 

Ancient Environment, ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Climate Change, Earth Science, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Palaeontology 

New research reveals that some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. These findings show that while socio-economic factors were traditionally considered to shape ancient human societies in this region, the influence of abrupt climate change should not be underestimated. 

The monumental ziggurat at the ancient city of Ur located in the  Thi Qar province, southern Iraq 

[Credit: The National] 

A team of international scientists led by researchers from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science found that during the first half of the last interglacial period known as the Holocene epoch, which began about 12,000 years ago and continues today, the Middle East most likely experienced wetter conditions in comparison with the last 6,000 years, when the conditions were drier and dustier. "Evidence for wet early Holocene was previously found in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea region, North and East African lakes and cave deposits from Southwest Asia, and attributed to higher solar insolation during this period," said Ali Pourmand, assistant professor of marine geosciences at the UM Rosenstiel School, who supervised the project. "Our study, however, is the first of its kind from the interior of West Asia and unique in its resolution and multi-proxy approach." 

The Fertile Crescent 

[Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica] 

The Fertile Crescent, a region in west Asia that extends from Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to the eastern Mediterranean Sea and northern Egypt is one of the most climatically dynamic regions in the world and is widely considered the birthplace of early human civilizations. "The high-resolution nature of this record afforded us the rare opportunity to examine the influence of abrupt climate change on early human societies. We see that transitions in several major civilizations across this region, as evidenced by the available historical and archaeological records, coincided with episodes of high atmospheric dust; higher fluxes of dust are attributed to drier conditions across the region over the last 5,000 years," said Arash Sharifi, Ph.D. candidate at the department of marine geosciences and the lead author of the study. Climate variability during the past 5000 years as told by the concentration of titanium (Ti) in sediment core from Neor Lake, NW Iran. The vertical orange bands denote periods of dry and dusty condition, which correlate with historical records of drought and famine in Iranian Plateau, Mesopotamia and Eastern Mediterranean (brown and black horizontal bars respectively). 

Transition between ruling dynasties (gray arrows) in Iran and North Mesopotamia coincides with the episodes of dry and dusty condition in the region (peaks in Ti intensities) 

[Credit: Arash Sharifi]

The researchers investigated climate variability and changes in paleoenvironmental conditions during the last 13,000 years based on a high-resolution (sub-decadal to centennial) peat record from Neor Lake in Northwest Iran. Abrupt climate changes occur in the span of years to decades. 
The findings appear in the Quaternary Science Reviews.


Source: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science [July 27, 2015]

Protesi ortopedica egizia, 3000 anni fa!

Prosthetic pin 

discovered in ancient 

Egyptian mummy 


ArchaeoHeritage, Archaeology, Breakingnews, Egypt, Forensics, Greater Middle East, Near East 


Researchers during a routine DNA test on a male Egyptian have made an astonishing discovery after finding a 23 cm iron orthopaedic screw inside his knee. 

The mummy is believed to date to between the 16th and 11th centuries BC  

[Credit: Beyond Belief Archive] 

The mummy is thought to have died between the 16th and 11 century BC and the pin is held in place by organic resin, similar to modern bone cement. 
Medical experts were so amazed by this discovery they drilled through the bone to allow access for an arthroscopic camera to take a closer look. 

This confirmed what they believed was impossible – that this operation was performed over 3,000 years ago. 

Not only were the researchers astonished that the pin is ancient, but the highly advanced design had the visiting surgeons in awe. 

The 23cm long nail found inside the mummy's knee  

[Credit: Beyond Belief Archive] 

"The pin is made with some of the same designs we use today to get good stabilisation of the bone," said Dr. Richard Jackson, an orthopeadic surgeon from Brigham Young University. 
Apparently, the ancient Egyptian doctors knew how to use the flanges on a screw to stabilise the rotation of the leg.
 To date, no other mummy has ever been found with evidence of a similar surgery. "I have to give the ancients a lot of credit for what they have done," added Dr. Wilfred Griggs, who led the team of scientists conducting DNA research on the mummy when they made this incredible find. 


Author: Jenny Paschall | Source: Express [July 12, 2015]

Nuova "Stele di Rosetta"

E' stata scoperta presso Alessandria e paragonata alla 

famosa Stele di Rosetta, perché è scritta in più lingue 

('solo' geroglifico e demotico, per la verità, mentre quella di 

Rosetta era scritta in tre: geroglifico, demotico e greco) che 

descrivono lo stesso argomento e sono pertanto un ottimo 

strumento di traduzione. Ma è grazie al lavoro di sei anni (!) 

di decifrazione e studio su di essa che molte altre scoperte 

sono state nel frattempo rese possibili: 

tombe di nobili, un buon numero di statue di Iside, molte 

monete bronzee di Cleopatra VII (sì: quella di Antonio).


Rosetta-style inscription unearthed in Egypt

  A 2,200 year-old “an upright stone slab bearing a commemorative inscription” was unearthed at the Mediterranean coast, Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty announced Thursday. 

The stele bearing hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions was discovered  at Taposiris Magna 

[Credit: Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities] 

The stele, which was discovered at Taposiris Magna archaeological site on Lake Mariout, southwest of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria,  “dates to the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204 B.C - 180 B.C) of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (332 B.C.-30 B.C) that has ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.” said Damaty in a statement on the ministry’s Facebook page. 

The stele, measuring 1.05 X 0.65 X 0.18 meters, was discovered by an archaeology mission of the Catholic University of Santo Domingo in collaboration with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), he added.

“It consists of two registers carved in two different scripts; the upper one features over 20 lines of hieroglyphic inscriptions bearing the cartouches [oval shapes bearing royal names only] of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, his sister Princess Cleopatra I, his mother Queen Arsinoe III and his father King Ptolemy IV Philopator,” said Damaty adding that archaeologists are currently working on transliterating the text.

View of the Osiris Temple at Taposiris Magna  

[Credit: Koantao/WikiCommons] 

The bottom register features a 5-line demotic script that seems to be a translation of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, said Damaty. Demotic language was used by ordinary people while hieroglyphic was used by royals, high officials, priests and the elite of the ancient Egyptian society. 

The famous Rosetta stone, currently displayed in the British Museum in London, dates back to the reign of the same Greek king but was carved in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek scripts, according to Damaty. 

Chief of the Dominican Egyptian archaeology mission, Dr. Kathleen Martinez said that the mission, has been working at Taposiris Magna for six years, has made a lot of significant discoveries related to the history of Alexandria. 

“Some of the major discoveries are tombs of Nobles, a number of statues of goddess Isis in addition to many bronze coins belonging to Queen Cleopatra VII, the famous Cleopatra of Anthony,” said Martinez. 

Author: Rany Mostafa  

Source: The Cairo Post [February 12, 2015]

GREEN SAHARA

Rapid end of the Green Sahara 8000 years ago 

9,000 years ago most of the Sahara was not the ultra-arid desert as we know it today. Due to higher precipitation it was covered by large lakes and savannah that were populated by herds of wild game. Scientists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) now have discovered that vegetation at the end of the Green Sahara disappeared much faster than previously assumed. This probably forced the Neolithic populations to start farming. The study has been published in the international open-access journal PLOS ONE. 

The Sahara is one of the most arid regions in the world. 9000 years ago, it was a green  savannah. Details on the transition could now be reconstructed from samples obtained  off the the mouth of the river Nile in the Mediterranean (yellow dot) [Credit: GEBCO world map 2014] 

Reconstructing the climate of the past is an important tool for scientists to better understand and predict future climate changes. This also applies to the relationships between human activities and environmental changes. In that respect, the Sahara Desert and the Nile valley are key areas since they underwent drastic environmental modification during the course of the last 10,000 years. In the same period, called Holocene by scientists, they were as well the scene of crucial steps of human evolution. At the beginning of the Holocene precipitation in northern Africa was much higher than today. The Sahara was a green savannah where large herds of wild game lived. But in the following millennia the region became one of the most arid areas on Earth. Now researchers from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) have discovered that the vegetation in the Sahara changed much faster than previously assumed. “Though the changes in temperatures and precipitation needed millennia, the vegetation changed dramatically in the course of centuries or even decades”, says Dr. Cecile Blanchet. She is lead author of the study. The initial forcing of the climatic changes during the Holocene was a southward migration of the African monsoon and its associated rain belt. “But there are large regional discrepancies in timing and intensity of the changes, the underlying mechanisms of which remain equivocal”, explains Professor Martin Frank, palaeo-oceanographer at GEOMAR and co-author of the study. During the same epoch, Neolithic human populations also underwent important evolution, such as the initiation of food production and the sedentariness of previously mobile hunter-gatherer populations. 

Approximately 8,000 year-old rock carvings of two giraffes from Dabous, Niger,  documenting that the Sahara was a green fertile Savannah at that time [Credit: Albert Backer/WikiCommons] 

“Providing a more precise timeframe for the wet-dry transition at the end of the African Humid Period is therefore crucial to understand early human-environment relationships”, adds Professor Stefan Schouten from NIOZ, also co-author. For the study Blanchet, Frank and Schouten analyzed a marine sediment core collected off the mouth of the Nile River in 700 metres depth by the German research vessel POSEIDON. Using an innovative combination of geochemical methods they were able to detect traces of the vegetation and eroded soil which had been transported by the river down to the Mediterranean. This allowed them to precisely reconstruct the changes in vegetation, erosion and river runoff in the Nile watershed and their driving mechanisms during the past 9500 years. This high-resolution reconstruction shows that a rapid degradation of the vegetation occurred about 8000 years ago while the overall river runoff only decreased gradually. These asynchronous changes highlight the role of threshold mechanisms in controlling the timing of environmental changes. Furthermore, the rapid shifts in vegetation and sediment source occurred earlier than in other regional records and may have exerted a significant pressure on the Neolithic population in northern Africa. “Maybe these fast changes forced people to use domesticated cattle as a sustainable food resource instead of hunting and gathering”, says Dr. Blanchet. Finally the aridification may have forced most of the population to move to the fertile Nile valley, which ultimately gave rise to the development of the high cultures of the Egyptian Pharaonic Kingdoms. "Of course, further research is needed to confirm this relationship between climate and human evolution. But with our results, we have strong evidence that even a slow climate change can cause rapid and dramatic changes in the environment, which would surely impact human societies" says Dr. Blanchet. 

Source: GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for ocean research [February 10, 2015] 

PRIME ABITAZIONI EGIZIE - IN 3D

Sembra essere solamente un gioco: per esempio, la sceneggiatura di un video game di ruolo ambientato nell'antichità. Ma è invece  il risultato grafico di uno studio serio con il quale, in base alle 
- risultanze archeologiche aggiornate ad oggi, 
- a studi compilativi presenti in letteratura di quanto si sa fino ad ora delle costruzioni egizie, 
- ad osservazioni sui rilievi ed i dipinti autentici dell'epoca ed infine
- osservazioni sull'edilizia tradizionale attuale,
si è cercato di ricostruire l'aspetto che le prime abitazioni comparse in Egitto potrebbero avere avuto. 
La maggiore incertezza concerne la ricostruzione dei tetti, circa i quali lo scavo archeologico non ha lasciato molto su cui lavorare. Malgrado l'uso del mattone di fango e la distruzione quasi totale a cui vanno incontro gli edifici realizzati con esso, i realizzatori dello studio sono abbastanza soddisfatti dei risultati ottenuti. 


Houses of the first Egyptians reconstructed 

 Virtual 3D models of more than 5,000 years old Egyptian homes, discovered during the excavations at Tell el-Farcha in the Nile Delta, prepared by Jacek Karmowski, PhD student 
of the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

"We associate the architecture of ancient Egypt primarily with stone construction - due to the most recognizable structures left by this civilization: the pyramids and monumental stone temples" - Jacek Karmowski told PAP.
 "In fact, the contemporary villages and towns were dominated by houses made of mud bricks" - he added. 
Structures built with such bricks are not particularly durable, unlike to those made with stones. Durability of the building material ensured their present, in some cases very good state of preservation. "It must be remembered that the stone architecture is a special, cult type of Egyptian construction, associated with religion and belief in the afterlife" - explained Karmowski. 
Work on the reconstruction of non-existent mudbrick structures really began during the excavations - the way of conducting excavations and documenting discovered layers is important.

The scientist traced the visible relics of bricks and outlines of houses from the functioning of the settlement with a total station laser and imported to a computer with CAD software - although archaeologists still usually draw on excavations in the classical way, using pencil and paper. 
With specialized software, he combined these data with photographs taken during field work. "But this is just the beginning. 
Then I went to the library and looked for other sources on possible reconstruction of houses. A big help are preserved models of houses from this period and dated a bit later depictions in painting and reliefs, showing different types of residential buildings" - described the archaeologist.
 The researcher also studied the ancient Egyptian building tradition. 

In the Egyptian religious architecture of the Old Kingdom (2686 - 2181 BC), the builders mirrored less durable materials in stone buildings - including wood and mud bricks.
 It was another clue. "An important role in the reconstruction had observations made in modern villages, including Gazala, which is near our site" - added Karmowski. 
Detailed analyses made by the Polish scientist showed that Egyptians living in the Nile Delta approx. 5,000 years ago, lived in houses made on regular, rectangular plan, with an area of tens of square meters.

Structures were built tightly next to each other. The windows were small and located in the upper part of the wall. "Their location was probably intended to protect the interior against unwanted intruders, such as scorpions and snakes. On the other hand, a small window clearance allowed for only the necessary amount of light entering the home, so that its interior would not get too heated" - explained the archaeologist. Lintels and window had support beams - their task was to relieve the empty space, and to protect mud bricks against erosion of and mechanical damage.

As is clear from contemporary analogies and archaeological documentation, the lower part of the door had a doorstep, probably placed above the ground level. This type of solution, according to the archaeologist, results from the need to protect homes from water during the periodic river flooding - these occurred in Egypt until the twentieth century, when the Aswan Dam was built. 

Houses did not have a door - Egyptians used mats to cover door openings instead. "It was difficult for us to reconstruct the roof - excavations have not provided conclusive information.

We turned to modern mud brick buildings again" - said Karmowski. According to the researcher it should be assumed that the roofs were made of light materials such as boards, branches of small trees, reeds or straw. The roofs were flat. In addition to the mud brick buildings, a number of other elements can be found in modern cities in the Nile Delta that have analogies in the historic materials and archaeological documentation. An example can be of various types of fences made of organic materials and property walls made of mud bricks.

These elements completed the virtual reconstruction. 
The site Tell el-Farcha has been studied for sixteen years by the Polish Expedition to the Eastern Nile Delta led by Prof. Krzysztof Ciałowicz of the Institute of Archaeology of the Jagiellonian University and Dr. Marek Chłodnicki from the Archaeological Museum in Poznań. The settlement functioned in this place for almost 1000 years, from approx. 3700 to 2700 BC

First, there was a strong Lower Egypt local culture centre, then an important centre of power during the formation of a unified Pharaonic state. Tell el-Farcha became famous a few years ago after the discovery of one of the world's oldest brewing centres, two gold statues of rulers dating back more than 5,000 years, extremely rich temple deposits, which included masterpieces of early Egyptian art - some of them can be seen today in the famous Egyptian Museum in Cairo. 

Photos by J. Karmowski Source: PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland 

[February 09, 2015]

Splendida scoperta, non cambierà la Storia.

Sicuramente, una splendida scoperta, che permette di formulare un'interessante ipotesi di lavoro.
Alcune perle di vetro - rinvenute in una molto singolare sepoltura danese dell'età del Bronzo - sono risultate (all'analisi spettrofotometrica) identiche ad alcune perle Egiziane che il Faraone Tutankamon  portò con sé nella tomba nel 1323 a.C.
Ciò permette di ipotizzare che - parallelamente al commercio in direzione Nord-Sud dell'Ambra - esistesse un concomitante e contemporaneo (1400- 1100 a.C.) commercio in direzione Sud-Nord delle perle di vetro.
Ambedue i materiali - ambra e vetro - posseggono la proprietà fisica di lasciarsi attraversare dalla luce del sole, illuminandosene. 
Proprio questo fatto potrebbe far pensare che siano entrambi materiali legati al Culto del Sole e che non sia stato solamente un motivo affettivo - bensì anche una credenza religiosa - che ha fatto di quei monili non semplici decorazioni dei vivi, ma anche oggetti da portarsi 
perfino nella tomba, per garantirsi un viaggio nel sole dell'Aldilà...

Una scoperta interessantissima e curiosa, ma che certamente non cambierà la Storia come noi la conosciamo, almeno fino a che qualcuno che sa non verrà a raccontarci che questo commercio era tenuto in piedi da guerrieri invincibili, che possedevano una loro scrittura, etc etc...



Danish Bronze Age glass beads traced to Egypt 



An international collaboration between Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, and Institut de Recherche sur les Archéomatériaux (IRAMAT) at Orléans, France, has resulted in a sensational discovery about the trade routes between Denmark and the ancient civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age 3,400 years ago. 

The discovery also gives us new knowledge about the sun cult in the Nordic Bronze Age. 

Above: The women from the Ølby site. The site was excavated in 1880 by Sophus Müller.  Next to the woman's left arm was a blue glass bead (from Egypt), two amber beads,  and two small bronze spirals; Below: Hesselagergård-pit excavated 1878-81.  On the neck lay a blue (Egyptian) glass bead and five amber beads  

[Credit: ScienceNordic] 

Archaeologists Jeanette Varberg from Moesgaard Museum and Flemming Kaul from the National Museum, and Bernard Gratuze, director of IRAMAT, analysed the composition of some blue glass beads found on buried Bronze Age women in Denmark. 

The analyses revealed that the glass originate from the same glass workshops in Egypt that supplied the glass that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun took with him to his grave in 1323 BC. 
The study was recently published in SKALK. 

Globalisation in the Bronze Age

Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. 

The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace elements 
match. 

The analyses of the Danish glass beads (•), here zirconium / titanium and chrome compared  with analytical results from Egypt (orange) and Mesopotamia (purple). 

A similar split pattern  resulted from the examination of other elements such as cobalt and boron 

[Credit: ScienceNordic] 

The researchers' first object for comparison was a bead from a wealthy woman's grave at Ølby, about 40 km south of Copenhagen. The woman had been buried in a more extravagant fashion, lying in a hollowed-out oak trunk and wearing a beautiful belt disc, a smart string skirt with tinkling, shining small bronzes tubes, and an overarm bracelet made of amber beads, and a single blue glass bead. 

Two early Mesopotamian gems found in Denmark  

[Credit: Denmark National Museum] 

The glass bead turned out to be Egyptian. 
This is the first time that typical Egyptian cobalt glass has been discovered outside the Mediterranean area.
 The archaeologists can now also substantiate that there is a connection between the amber beads and the glass beads. 

These 44 turquoise beads were found in a Bronze Age urn in 1885  

[Credit: ScienceNordic]

 It has been known for a long time that amber was exported in the Bronze Age from Nordic latitudes and southwards. 
Tutankhamun and other Egyptian pharaohs had large amber chains in boxes in their burial chambers. 
Now the researchers are linking amber and glass together in an unexpected way. 

Nordic and Egyptian sun cults traded goods 

One property that both glass and amber have is that sunlight penetrates their surface. It appears that glass and amber beads have been found together on sites from the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Germany to the Nordic latitudes. 
The archaeologists believe this could be proof of a link between the Egyptian sun cult and the Nordic sun cult.

Among the eight main head-rests in Tutankhamun's tomb was one made of blue glass  with gold foil around the edge 

[Credit: ScienceNordic] 

When a Danish woman in the Bronze Age took a piece of jewellery made of amber and blue glass with her to the grave, it constituted a prayer to the sun to ensure that she would be re-united with it and share her fate with the sun's on its eternal journey. 

The old amber route to the countries in the Mediterranean thus now has a counterpart: the glass route to the North. 
So far, the researchers have shown that there was a trade connection to Egypt and Mesopotamia in the years 1400-1100 BC. 
Finding out whether the route continued in the later Bronze Age is a future task for the Danish-French research team. 


Authors: Jeanette Varberg,  Flemming Kaul & Bernard Gratuze | Source: ScienceNordic [December 07, 2014]

Influenza della siccità sulle Antiche Civiltà

Ecco un interessante studio dell'Università tedesca di Tubinga  (pubblicato su PNAS), che spiega come l'influenza del Clima sull'Agricoltura abbia rappresentato un fattore chiave 
sulla nascita (e sulla caduta) delle società dell'antico Medio Oriente.

Materiale: 1037 prelievi da 33 aree geografiche di semi di Orzo (Hordeum Vulgaris) di data variabile da 12.000 a 2500 anni fa.

Metodi: studio degli isotopi stabili del Carbonio contenuto nei semi prelevati: quando l'erba dell'orzo riceve acqua in quantità insufficiente durante la crescita, la proporzione di isotopi pesanti di carbonio che fissa è più elevata del normale. 12C e 13C sono stabili per migliaia di anni e possono essere convenientemente misurati e paragonati con le colture moderne della stessa regione.

Scopi: La dimostrazione, solamente iniziata, di come molte aree del Medio Oriente furono pesantemente influenzate, nei rimedi tecnici necessari e che furono ideati dalle popolazioni locali per i propri stanziamenti (irrigazione, canalizzazione) e nelle scelte che presero (in estremi casi, l'abbandono) a seconda della fluttuazione del clima.

Climate change and drought in ancient times 


The influence of climate on agriculture is believed to be a key factor in the rise and fall of societies in the Ancient Near East. 
Dr. Simone Riehl of Tübingen University’s Institute for Archaeological Science and the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment has headed an investigation into archaeological finds of grain in order to find out what influence climate had on agriculture in early farming societies. 
Her findings are published in this week’s PNAS – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 Archaeological researchers are using stable carbon isotope data from archaeobotanical  barley grains to measure drought stress signals to study climate-related changes  in agricultural production 

[Credit: Simone Riehl, University of Tübingen] 

She and her team analyzed grains of barley up to 12,000 years old from 33 locations across the Fertile Crescent to ascertain if they had had enough water while growing and ripening. 
Riehl found that periods of drought had had noticeable and widely differing effects on agriculture and societies in the Ancient Near East, with settlements finding a variety of ways to deal with the problem.

The 1,037 ancient samples were between 12,000 and 2,500 years old. 

They were compared with modern samples from 13 locations in the former Fertile Crescent. Dr. Riehl and her team measured the grains’ content of two stable carbon isotopes. 
When barley grass gets insufficient water while growing, the proportion of heavier carbon isotopes deposited in its cells will be higher than normal. 
The two isotopes 12C und 13C remain stable for thousands of years and can be measured precisely – giving Simone Riehl and her colleagues reliable information on the availability of water while the plants were growing. 
They found that many settlements were affected by drought linked to major climate fluctuations. 
“Geographic factors and technologies introduced by humans played a big role and influenced societies’ options for development as well as their particular ways of dealing with drought,” says Riehl. 
Her findings indicate that harvests in coastal regions of the northern Levant were little affected by drought; but further inland, drought lead to the need for irrigation or, in extreme cases, abandonment of the settlement. 
The findings give archaeologists clues as to how early agricultural societies dealt with climate fluctuations and differing local environments. 
“They can also help evaluate current conditions in regions with a high risk of crop failures,” Riehl adds.
 The study is part of a German Research Foundation-backed project looking into the conditions under which Ancient Near Eastern societies rose and fell. 

Source: Universitaet Tübingen [August 12, 2014] 

Read more at: http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.it/2014/08/climate-change-and-drought-in-ancient.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheArchaeologyNewsNetwork+(The+Archaeology+News+Network)#.U-xKiCh7DfU
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