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Mediterranean Culture and Climatic Change: Past Patterns and Future Trends

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The Mediterranean Sea

Abstract

This chapter illustrates the main trends of interlaced forces acting on the development of the Mediterranean landscape during the Holocene. The mosaic of habitats distributed in the Mediterranean basin has been continuously transformed by climatic changes occurring at a global scale during the early, mid and late Holocene. In the meantime, the environment has been exploited and the landscape shaped by different civilizations. Climate changes and human activities are observed through the lens of pollen found in terrestrial and marine sediment cores and in archaeological layers. Joint actions of increasing dryness, climate oscillations, and human impact are hard to disentangle, and this becomes particularly true after the mid-Holocene onset of Bronze Age cultures. Regional differences and similarities are reported for eastern, central and western Mediterranean, and for northern Africa and Sahara. The mixing of cultures accelerated the exchanges of ideas, technologies, raw materials and people along the coasts of this ‘great lake’, making the different civilizations linked between them as one network of regions belonging to the ‘Mediterranean culture’.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Stefano Goffredo and Zvy Dubinsky for the invitation to write this chapter. A special acknowledgement to David Lubell and Yannick Miras who greatly improved the manuscript with helpful comments and suggestions. This chapter was conceived in the frame of the PRIN (2008FJCEF4) project PICAR (Cultural landscape and human impact in circum-Mediterranean countries).

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  1. Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Viale Caduti in Guerra 127, 41123, Modena, Italy

    Anna Maria Mercuri

  2. Dipartimento di Biologia Ambientale, Università “La Sapienza”, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Laura Sadori

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  1. Anna Maria Mercuri
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Correspondence to Anna Maria Mercuri .

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  1. Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Goffredo

  2. Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Zvy Dubinsky

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Mercuri, A.M., Sadori, L. (2014). Mediterranean Culture and Climatic Change: Past Patterns and Future Trends. In: Goffredo, S., Dubinsky, Z. (eds) The Mediterranean Sea. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6704-1_30

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