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Climate Change and Inequality in the Ancient Mediterranean: History
Please note this is an old version of this entry, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Subjects: Archaeology

(1) Background: Climate change and inequality are topics of major interest in Mediterranean Archaeology. However, comparatively less attention has been dedicated to how these themes are interlinked in the literature. No scoping review has ever addressed this issue. This study aims to identify major research trends on inequality and climate change in the Mediterranean c. 4000 BC–AD 500. It also pinpoints current research gaps on the topic and nascent areas of enquiry. (2) Method: We performed a scoping review on JSTOR, Scopus, Google Scholar and PubMed in December 2025–January 2026. A modified version of the PRISMA-ScR protocol was followed. We sampled journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes and monographs published between 2015 and 2025 which matched the search and inclusion criteria. Additional searches were done on Google Scholar in February 2026 to expand upon emerging research trends relevant to our topic but largely absent from the scoping review. We manually extracted, charted, analysed and synthesised the data. (3) Results: A total of 154 studies were eligible for the scoping review. We identified six research trends prominent in the sampled literature: 1. the rise and fall of world systems, macroscale causal links, and collapse research; 2. inequality, subalternity, and marginality; 3. agriculture, crops, and diet; 4. natural resource management, and water supply; 5. epistemology and methodology; and 6. natural archives and climate proxy datasets. We also recognised the following research gaps or topics that were comparatively less addressed: collapse research applied to the microscale level and marginalised communities; isotope analysis applied to both climate change and inequality in the same study; biomedical approaches applied to both climate change and inequality in the same study; social marginality as a complex construct in human–climate interactions; and the environmental and climate dimensions of the early Roman expansion, especially regarding marginality and the microscale. Finally, we identified artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, environmental and climate activism, and the perception of climate hazards by subaltern communities as nascent topics of interest that might rise to prominence in the future. (4) Conclusions: We identified major research trends and gaps on climate change and inequality in the ancient Mediterranean in literature published 2015–2025. We also recognised nascent or unexplored topics. The review is intended as a benchmark for developing novel research on the cutting-edge of Mediterranean Archaeology.

  • inequality
  • climate change
  • ancient Mediterranean
  • Mediterranean Archaeology
  • marginality
  • late prehistory
  • subalternity
  • Roman empire
  • isotope analysis
The current climate crisis has shown that social inequality is a key factor in shaping the impacts of climate change. Marginalised groups are considerably more at risk of experiencing negative effects of climate change in terms of socioeconomic impacts, health, nutrition, displacement, housing, access to water, and general wellbeing [1,2,3]. This highlights the need to approach climate change and social inequality as interlinked phenomena, both in the present as well as in the past. The ancient Mediterranean presents itself as an optimal opportunity to address the complex link between climate change and social inequality from a deep time perspective; it features a wide variety of ecosystems, climatic phenomena and complex trajectories of sociopolitical evolution. Mediterranean Archaeology has long addressed the impact of climate change on societies [4,5]. Social inequality is also a major topic of interest [6]. More recently, subalternity and marginality have come to the fore in the field [7,8,9]. However, there has been comparatively little discussion of the extent to which climate change and inequality are approached as interconnected phenomena in the literature on the ancient Mediterranean. No scoping review has ever addressed this question.
To clarify these issues, we carried out a scoping review of current approaches to climate change and inequality in the ancient Mediterranean between late prehistory and the Roman period (fourth millennium BC to c. AD 500). This was a critical phase in the rise of social complexity and empires, also characterised by well-documented environmental developments and climate oscillations. We searched Google Scholar, Scopus, JSTOR and PubMed. Our objectives were to identify: (i) main trends in research on climate change and inequality in the field between 2015 and 2025; (ii) gaps to address in research as of early 2026; and (iii) possible nascent research trends as of early 2026. The results of the scoping review, and of subsequent tailored Google Scholar searches, allowed us to pinpoint major focuses of scholarly inquiry, gaps in current understandings, as well as “uncharted territories” in the study of climate change and inequality in the ancient Mediterranean.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6050110

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