9 - Regional settlement abandonment at the end of the Copper Age in the lowlands of west–central Portugal

Summary

[The Copper Age of Iberia] arose suddenly and … attained a rich flourishment; but this brilliance lasted only a short time and it disappeared at last without leaving any trace of itself.

(Åberg 1921:1)

Introduction

A major challenge prehistorians face is explaining regional settlement abandonment among sedentary agricultural communities, particularly those who have invested a significant amount of energy and time in constructing and maintaining settlements. There are, indeed, many examples of regional abandonment among such communities in the prehistoric past; these include the depopulation of the Four Corners area of the southwest United States around AD 1300 and the abandonment of Mycenaean palaces in the Argolid plain of Greece at about 1200 BC. Attempts to explain these abandonments have often focused on the occurrence of a social or environmental catastrophe, such as a war, flood, drought, or volcanic eruption, which directly affected the entire region. In some causes, these events can be documented (see Cameron 1991a:178–81). In general, however, I would argue that unicausal explanations can not account for the archaeological or paleoenvironmental data associated with most regional abandonments. This is principally because the landscapes that prehistoric communities inhabited were rarely so environmentally uniform or sociopolitically integrated that one catastrophic event would have affected an entire region to the extent that all settlements in that region would have been abandoned. In the abandonment of a regional settlement system for which there is evidence of unequal access to raw materials, land, or power, or some degree of economic, territorial, or ideological domination, a more appropriate explanatory framework would recognize the possibility of different but interdependent abandonment mechanisms having taken place throughout a region.