Resilience and vulnerability to climate change in the Greek Dark Ages

[Display omitted] •Agent-based modelling is used to evaluate the resilience of the Late Bronze Age society in the Aegean.•Simulation outputs closely reproduce the processes inferred from the archaeological record.•Droughts were more likely to affect the demographic decline than Sea Peoples’ raids.•Sea Peoples probably affected trade distances and settlement patterns.•Rainfall variability, soil erosion and dietary patterns become vulnerability factors. The Late Bronze Age crisis has traditionally been considered a turning point in the recent prehistory of the eastern Mediterranean. Between the 13th and 11th centuries B.C., the Aegean area experienced a dramatic reduction in the annual precipitation, the destruction or shrinkage of a large number of urban centres, critical demographic constrictions, an increase in struggles, and changes in settlement patterns. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain these transformations; however, very few studies have explicitly examined the complex and dynamic set of relationships between the parameters that contributed to this crisis. In this study, we use an agent-based model to explore how (a) aridity, (b) rainfall variability, (c) intensity of raiding, (d) soil erosion and (e) dietary reliance on agriculture could have influenced (a) the human pressure for cultivable lands, (b) demographic behaviour, (c) settlement patterns, (d) commercial networks and (e) migrations. Outputs obtained from the simulations are consistent with the archaeological record and suggest that soil degradation, rainfall variability and dietary reliance on agriculture could have amplified the socio-ecological effects of the climatic change in the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age.