| ABSTRACT | The Aegean Late Bronze Age encompasses around six hundred years of societal variability within fragmented landscapes. Societal processes were always interlinked in this period, but did not always run in parallel. Such variation should advise against general or Aegean-wide explanatory frameworks. Relative short-term developments, such as climate anomalies and periods of accentuated societal change, need to be considered as part of more long-term processes. The present paper offers a view of the long-term history of human-environment interaction on the Peloponnese peninsula, spanning the whole of the Late Bronze Age (1700-1050 BCE). The rich archaeological record is discussed in relation to climate sequences recently made available from Peloponnesian speleothem records. Long-term societal processes in the Late Bronze Age Peloponnese encompass the dynamic and heterogeneous Early Mycenaean societies as well as the expansive uniformity of the palatial Mycenaean time. Recent speleothem data suggest that both periods were characterized by dry conditions of similar magnitude. The development of the societies under these conditions, however, was not the same. While the Early Mycenaean period saw emergent expansion that would result in the establishment of the Mycenaean palace economies some centuries later, the dry conditions around 1200 BCE correspond roughly in time with the end of the palatial era on the Greek mainland. The contemporaneousness of aridity and societal change, on the Greek mainland and elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, has been hotly debated recently. The new paleoclimatological data from the Peloponnese will be brought to bear on this debate, as well as on the evaluation of the sustainability of ancient Peloponnesian societies under climate stress. |