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Chapter Abstracts
capricious environment. The vigorous debates generated by these collapse episodes
also exemplify the difficulty of pinning down and explaining the causal
factors behind social and environmental transformations. The case studies presented
here challenge the reader to tease apart the complicated interconnections
that link human action and institutional management with processes of
environmental degradation and climate change.
This chapter focuses on the Bronze Age (ca. 3000–1200 BC) in Mesopotamia.
Following immediately on the heels of state formation and the socalled
Urban Revolution, the Bronze Age was a time of demographic flux and
intense political contestation. Cities dominated the landscape, and powerful
urban institutions vied for control over the labor and resources of a heterogeneous
population. During several brief episodes of political centralization,
expansionist dynasties created regional-scale polities that eventually dissolved,
leaving a recurring pattern of autonomous city-states. At the same time, occasional
evidence for large groups of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists hints
at the existence of segments of the population that were able to operate, at least
partially, beyond the bounds of institutional control.
The complexity and dynamism of the socio-political landscape in Bronze
Age Mesopotamia must take center stage in any study of environmental hazards
and their impact on human society. The inhabitants of Mesopotamia were
confronted with a difficult and unpredictable environment, and many of them
dealt directly with that environment on a daily basis as they plowed their fields,
worked their gardens, or led their animals to pasture. For many, however, interaction
with the environment was mediated by or filtered through institutional
structures; the effects of institutional control were an ever-present fact of life,
whether visible in the strict orchestration of daily tasks or, more indirectly,
in the legacy of a heavily managed and modified agricultural landscape. This
chapter provides an introduction to the range of hazards—both strictly “environmental”
and human-induced—that threatened the livelihood of people
and the survival of settlements and states in Bronze Age Mesopotamia. It also
outlines the responses that were available and the short- and long-term impacts
of different types of hazard. Throughout the discussion, emphasis is placed on
the evolving role of institutional management and the shifting boundaries of
institutional domination.
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