Abstract:
How can we trace the relationship between climate change and culture change in the ancient past? A collaborative and interdisciplinary project coordinated by Katina Lillios, with Antonio Blanco-González, Brandon Lee Drake, and Jose Antonio López-Sáez, offered insights into this question through the lens of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE of Iberia. This project was the first to comprehensively examine of one of the major episodes of cultural change in later prehistoric Iberia from a comparative regional perspective and assess its relationship to the 4.2 ky BP climate event. In this talk, I summarize the available cultural, demographic and paleoenvironmental evidence for Iberia, and explore the diverse ways that the 4.2 ky BP event seems to have played out in different regions.

Professor Lillios is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She received her BA in Archaeology and Art History from Boston University, and her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University. Her research has centered on the histories of the people who lived in Portugal and Spain from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age (4000-1000 BC), a dynamic period characterized by episodes of political centralization, devolution, and climate change. In this research, she brings together a concern for memory and object biographies to understand the ways that people of the past used objects and monuments of their own past, such as heirlooms and ancestral burials, to shape their futures. She recently authored the book The Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula: From the Paleolithic to the Bronze Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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