4 - Pulses in an Electromagnetic Field

Summary

This chapter provides a survey of the close of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of Iron Age towns, and delivers an updated synthesis of existing evidence and arguments for climatic shifts across the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to fourth centuries BCE. Kearns then undertakes an island-wide comparative analysis of ruralization and urbanization apparent in survey records by the mid-first millennium BCE. Focusing on legacy and recent survey data, the chapter argues for oscillations in sedentism across the island as communities experienced environmental changes and cultivated new weathering practices, and situates the re-emergence of social differentiation in the relationships between households and land and new spaces for public gathering at tombs and shrines.