Civilizing Climate.

• Position: Book review

Civilizing Climate: Social Responses to Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. By ARLENE MILLER ROSEN. Lanham, Maryland: ALTAMIRA PRESS, 2007. Pp. xiv + 209, illus. $72 (cloth); $32.95 (paper).

It is hard to be an informed citizen in the twenty-first century and not be aware of the ongoing debates over the melting of polar ice caps, species extinctions, global warming, and other modern maladies. In Arlene Rosen's most recent book, she reminds us that climate change, and the concomitant human decisions, are staples of life on this earth. She reviews environmental, architectural, and artifactual data from a wide range of societies, dating from the Natufian hunter-gatherers (living between circa 14,500 B.P. until 11,600 B.P.) through the Levantine portion of the Byzantine Empire (until approximately C.E. 600). This 13,000-year range provides an important chronological context for understanding past and present climate change. The author is less comprehensive in her geographical focus, concentrating on the eastern Mediterranean, especially Israel and the Levant. But even here she includes examples from North America and Africa. One of the many strengths of this readable book is the seamless integration of archaeological, historic, and paleoclimatic data to produce a diachronic, anthropological model of climate change. A second strength is the emphasis on human agency in discussing environmental trends. (As Rosen points out, civilizations can fail even under ideal climate conditions.) In the author's own words, "this volume takes the stance that societies operate on both the conceptual and practical planes and have the innate potential to adjust to detrimental environmental shifts through either social mechanisms or technological change" (p. 8).

The book is organized into eight chapters, with an eponymously titled ninth and final chapter. The 180 pages of text are interspersed with thirty-one figures and eight tables. The illustrations are very useful for understanding esoteric climate data, such as isotopic records and speleothem values. The illustrations, not surprisingly, highlight trench sections and the distribution of sites across the landscape, with only a handful of feature photographs. To understand fully the cultural context for these examples it would help to read a more substantive report. Chapter one, "Holocene Climate and Society: Civilization and Climate Revisited," begins with a brief overview of the research that influenced V...