Climate Change the Cause of Late Bronze Age Collapse

There are many theories as to why civilization of Late Bronze Age culture collapsed. The Bronze Age collapse can be divided into three categories: economic, military, and climatic and there have been many theories including plagues. This paper will argue that climate change was the most important factor for what happened in the late Bronze Age. Due to current advances in technology and science, some researchers have deduced that climate change is the major factor.
Before its collapse the Eastern Mediterranean, housed some of the world’s most advanced civilizations. Mycenaean culture had many powerful urban centers. Hittiens had a large empire in a part of modern day northwest Syria. …show more content…
Towards the latter end of the Bronze Age most urban centers in the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. The events that transpire start at around 1315 BC and end around 1050 BC. The collapse is associated with the loss of writing styles and the extinction of Hatti as a language. The collapse took place in different places at different times; it did not just happen overnight. The destruction of settlements is mostly human related. Between 1200 BC and 850 BC, the site of Giala-Tell Tweini in Syria was identified to have a prolonged drought in that area through pollen alluvial records.
The reason they used pollen samples was because, according Dr. Dafna Langgut, “Pollen grains are one of the most durable organic materials in nature, best preserved in lakes and deserts and lasting thousands of years. Each plant produces its own distinct pollen form, like a fingerprint. Extracting and analyzing the pollen grains from each stratum allows researchers to identify the vegetation that grew in the area and to reconstruct climate …show more content…
Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein and his colleges concluded, through a study by radiocarbon dating fossilized pollen, that the main cause of the collapse resulted from, a long line of major droughts over a 150-year period from 1250 BC to around 1100 BC. These droughts caused climate change that led to crop failure and food shortage, causing a quickening in the event of the collapse. The lab work was done at both at Bonn and Tel Aviv. To get more accurate dates, Finkelsten et al told the scientists at Tel Aviv to focus on the time period between 3,500 BC and 500 BC. This process began in 2010 and took three years to complete.
These dates come from core samples taken form the bottom of the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea. They noticed a drastic decline of oaks, pines, and carob trees and increase in plants normally found in semiarid desert regions around 1250 BC. Olive trees also suffered a large drop in reproduction in the