Interview with Hervé Reculeau for the Oriental Institute Oral History Project

[0:05] Hi, I'm Hervé Reculeau. I'm an assistant professor of Assyriology at the University of Chicago here, at the Oriental Institute and in the Department of Near Eastern languages and civilizations, and in the College too. My interest with Assyriology started when I was an undergraduate in in France, where I studied at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. I was an undergrad in history and I was interested in the ancient world, and for me that meant mostly, you know, Greek and Roman worlds and then I realized that there were other areas, more ancient ones, and I started taking classes in ancient Mesopotamian history, and I, I just got hooked, and then I got a PhD and, well, a masters, a PhD and postdocs and, you know, I have a job as an Assyriologist.

[0:49] One of the things that I do as an assistant professor here in Assyriology is that I teach students how to read and decipher cuneiform writing on clay tablets and the language that was noted in these clay tablets, which is Akkadian. Actually I'm not the only one who does this. This is one of the great riches here in the University of Chicago, that there are four currently, four Assyriology professors. Martha Roth, Susanne Paulus, John Wee and myself, and there's also Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee, who's a linguist but whose work really focuses on Akkadian, so students really have the opportunity to learn from specialists of different periods, different kind of scripts, different kinds of dialects, the different ways in which Akkadian evolved throughout the millennia, and that's something that is offered, I think, almost nowhere else in the world.

[1:40] So I'm currently involved in a collaborative project that's called, we call it for short, 3CEA - Coping with Changing Climates in Early Antiquity. So that's a project that involves some faculty and graduate students here at the University of Chicago but also colleagues and students from Perdue University and the University of Michigan. We are very fortunate because we received an award from the Humanities Without Walls consortium, which is funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, to support collaboration and interdisciplinary among the humanities.

[2:12] So this is a project that is looking at how ancient societies in Egypt, in Anatolia, in the eastern Mediterranean dealt with episodes of climate change. So, the evidence that we use to reconstruct climate change, obviously we cannot measure like temperature and rainfall in antiquity because we don't have the measures that we use for modern climate change. So one of the first things that is required is to have proxy data - data that can tell you what the climate was like in the past. So these are things like ice cores, lake sediments, pollens, all these elements that record parts of the climatic patterns in the past. So this is not something that we do ourselves, this is a field that has been booming in the past 30 years that's called paleoclimatology and now this field has reached a degree of maturity where really we have a good idea of how climate evolved throughout the millennia and with dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating we can also point these over the chronological scale.

[3:17] So this is the climatic part. But when you look at climate in societies, of course, you also want to look at the societies part and that's where we come into play because for us what is interesting is not so much how climate evolves through times but how it affected ancient societies. How they perceived climate change. How they reacted to it. So that's where you need to have people who can well excavate and understand archaeological material or read ancient texts like Egyptologists, Hittitologists or myself as an Assyriologist.

[3:52] Well, climate by definition is a very important component of ancient history because all societies in the past were agrarian societies. Even these societies that we study in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, we think of them as urban societies because of course they created very important cities, but the background for these cities was agriculture, was the countryside. People that we don't often see in the text because they are not elites. They do not partake to the world of the palace or the temple, but they are the people who were sustaining the whole system, the foundations of the societies.

[4:27] So everybody in these societies would have been very aware of anything connected to agriculture, and my work really focuses on agriculture. So what matters for people who are working on agriculture? I mean for these, the peasants or the landlords or the tax collectors, because the taxes are also based on agricultural production. It's not so much climate actually, it's the weather. It's what kind of weather you get at what, which point in the year, in the agricultural cycle. If you have enough rainfall or irrigation water for your crops to grow, if the temperature is adequate, et cetera, et cetera.

[5:05] So when we look at climate change, we actually look at something a little different. Climate is not the weather. Climate is an extrapolation of the weather, if you will, over a longer period of time. In modern science this is used through statistics. You take all these different factors of climates like rainfall temperature and others, and you look at the mean and variability of a period that is conventionally 30 years. Of course, we don't have these statistics for the past, but in a way we don't need them, because what is important is that everybody perceives climates.

[5:43] I don't do statistics, but I know what kind of weather is expected at that time of year, and that's what we all do all the time when we have this small talk about climate. Oh, it's pretty, it's pretty rainy for the season, or it's pretty sunny for the season, or it's pretty warm. This is because human beings have an anticipation of what their environment, what the weather should be and what interests us as historians of the past is that people act based on these and it's on these expectations. So if the actual climate is changing, what is interesting for us is do they change their expectations?

[6:23] Or do they still stick to this anticipation, these expectations that they have and then maybe behave in a way that will not be optimal for the kind of climate that is now evolving. So one of the things that we are interested in, in this project especially, is to look at ancient climate change in a way that is quite different from the way it is depicted in most popular books or in newspapers when they report about and informally in a lot of, actually in a lot of scientific articles also.

[6:58] As I said we have this very important amount of data that has been produced over the past thirty years and in a way it has taken over the discussion above the discussion on climate change in antiquity and it is of course correlated to the way we are perceiving climate change today and the fears that we have for the future. What we are trying to put back in the picture and trying to make people aware of is that climate change has never been in the past, or I think in the present and future, something that is a deterministic force that you know takes over social agency.

[7:41] So one of the most popular ways of depicting ancient climate change is to look at it as the cause for social collapse. That's a very strong narrative, something that you can read a lot in newspapers, in books, for the general audience, and in some, in some scientific research too. The problem with that discourse is that it usually does not really represent what the material really tells us. One of the main issues is that it's very hard to come, to correlate ancient climatic data, paleoclimatic data and historical data, archeological data because these work at very different scales of time and of space.

[8:27] So when you look at a curve of ancient changes in the climate, sometimes two hundred three hundred years will be just one dot on that curve, but for us as historians there's a lot happening in two hundred years and so one of the things that we are trying to to do is to make people aware that you know the way societies respond, the way human beings act actually have an importance that needs to be taken into consideration for the past and I think also for the present and the future.

[9:00] Let me just take an example, one of the cases that I'm studying on currently is what is called the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. That's one of the most famous cases where you have, in Anatolia, the Hittites on the, in the Levant, in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Aegean, a number of societies that disappear roughly at the same times, around the 12th century BC and there's one important narrative about this collapse that says, well, this was correlated with an abrupt climatic event around the 12th to 10th century BC.

[9:43] Now, the difficulty is, how did they correlate, and can we, can we make correlation equate causation? And that's where often the logical fallacy is. Because, as I said, we have these difficulties in time scale. So, first of all, when you look at the detail, at the data carefully, you realize that collapse is maybe too big of a word. There are many cases where patterns of continuity can be found if you look for them. So that's one of the first issues. The second one, I think more generally, and that's something that Eric Cline pointed out in a book that he published a few years ago about that very episode of collapse, is that it's very rare in history that one single cause creates social collapse.

[10:26] It's always what he calls a perfect storm of calamities that makes societies go past a certain tipping point. But more importantly for, for us in the project and for me, especially in my work, what I'm trying to see is, do we really have an abrupt episode that is working on this, in this pattern of, you know, climate, bad climate, causes social collapse? This is a very strong narrative because it's simple. Good climate, civilization. Bad climate, end of civilization. That's very easy. Everybody understands that. The problem is that it's not true.

[11:11] So one of the things that I did when I was working, I was interested in Assyria at first because that's what I would study as a cuniformist, and also because it's a very interesting situation, Assyria, in that same period, because they did not collapse. This is, there's this general assumption that they went through harder times, at least as a political entity. But they did not collapse, they survived and around the 9th century BC they became one of the leading and then the leading Imperial policy in the Middle East. So it's interesting to look at the ones who survived through that "abrupt" episode and when you look at the data and especially, I was looking at textual evidence that comes not from that time of the collapse but just before - the 14th and especially the 13th century BC.

[11:56] We have cuniform records from a city called Dur Katlimmu in Syria. And these are the records of the harvests on the fields. And what is interesting is that through the archaeological and the textual record we can see that, at that point, when the Assyrians were expanding in the Syrian Jazira. They also apparently had a very strong program of agrarian development and this involved irrigation. Now that's interesting because in Assyria traditionally, it's more of a rain-fed agriculture country.

[12:29] So irrigation is not part of their traditions. So they're expanding militarily, they're expanding their politics, and they're also expanding their agrarian practices in areas where you need irrigation and also probably in a time when the climate was also becoming drier. So what was interesting for me, when I looked at this, is that this so-called abrupt episode, once again it's abrupt for 200 years, but it comes at the very end of a long trend that started at the end of the 3rd millennium BC.

[13:00] So all throughout the second millennium BC the weather was getting, I mean there are ups and downs, but really the general trend is that the weather was getting drier. And so these societies that we see flourishing in the Late Bronze Age, that's the time of the Amarna correspondence, the Golden Age of internationalism in the ancient times, these were also being built on the frame of a climate that was becoming drier, that was changing. So what interests me is how this changes the pictures, complicates the pictures, because if we look at the Assyrians clearly, I think that they perceive that climate was changing. That's, that explained partly their expansion.

[13:42] They went to areas where they had access to good irrigation water so that they could expand their agrarian production. But the fact is we have the records of their productions and we know that they were not very good. The harvest yields that they have are extremely poor. But what interested me as a historian is not that they failed, it's that they tried. So they were realizing that something was happening and they tried to anticipate, they tried to deal with it and whether they, it worked or not is in a way not so much what matters here because what I want to look at is how societies try to cope with climate change.

[14:21] So this project is probably going to be one of the most or the most important project I'm going to work on, the 3CEA project, but I have also other projects that are ongoing. Another one actually is also focusing on climate change in society, but from a completely different angle. That's part of a collaboration that we have here at OI with the CRANE project, which is the Computational Research on the Ancient Near East. It's a project that is hosted at the University of Toronto in Canada and I'm just one of many partners in this very, very big project and I'm working with Dr. Lynn Welton who's from Durham University and who was a postdoc at the OI a few years ago. That's how we started collaborating.

[15:05] That's what is great with the OI actually, you meet people and then you start having research projects. So what we do is that we are looking at social response to climate change, but not from the archaeological or the textual data as we would do in a project like 3CEA, but we're trying to model it using computer models. So I'm not a computer scientist. I'm not able to do models at all. But Lynn Welton is, so she is developing two different models. One that is an agent-based model. So it's modeling an agrarian society and how they would react under certain conditions of stress.

[15:45] And then the other one that is being developed within the CRANE project is basically using one of the general, general circulation models that is being used by the IPCC to model future climates and to use them for past periods and to use them. One of the specificities of that model is that it goes to a very detailed level of analysis. The scale is, is really unprecedented. So we are, we will be able to focus on really an area that roughly encompasses northern Syria, southern southeastern Anatolia and we'll try to model behavior.

[16:24] So, let's say we, the climate model tells us well we have this aridification episode around the end of the Late Bronze Age, and once again, the end of the Late Bronze Age is one of the periods that we are going to model and look at. So, how would our model society respond to that? What would be their strategy? So say, we say that we give into the model that they can, you know, expand their, the number of fields that they're cultivating or they can intensify their cultivation and then we see how, what happens. We model this through cell cycle and cycle and cycle.

[17:00] So, of course this is not going to tell us what happened in the past, but that's not the point. This is testing scenarios and then we can look at the evidence that we have from the past and we see, well, does the evolution in the model mirror in any way what we have on the ground, and if not, well, maybe that's an indication that we need to rework on the model, or maybe that's an indication that our theory of how they would adapt is not the right one. So that's a way to look at the same questions, but upside down. So my role So my role in this in this project is, as I said, not the computer part because I cannot do it. But as a historian, I'm working on making the agent base model, especially, the most realistic because I know how ancient societies worked, agrarian societies worked.

[17:47] So I'm trying to make the model the closest possible to what this, to what we know from these societies. That's very exciting for me because that's really forcing me to look at things in the way that are completely alien to my personal training, so it's very exciting, a little scary, but very exciting.