The Cyclades today are mostly sparsely populated islands, barren and dry, with very few forests (or even trees) and potential for agriculture, and some even suffer water shortages in summer and have to bring it by boat. Abandoned terraces can be seen across the islands.
Yet these islands were home to flourishing cultures in the Antiquity, they traded and exported all sorts of goods. Was the climate different in Antiquity in the center of the Aegean? Were the Cyclades more populated then than today? Did some of them have forests? And could human intervention (like overgrazing, deforestation, etc) explain the way they look today?
First response in AH... if it's not up to snuff, I apologize.
The islands of the Aegean and actually much of the eastern Mediterranean used to be much more densely forested than it is now. Poor land management practices are primarily at fault. The big one nowadays is overgrazing. It was likely fuel and land-clearing for cereal production in the past.
The Med Deforestation source below has a nice chart showing the number of sheep and goats in the Cyclades over the last 40 years or so:
| 1965 | 1970 | 1975 | 1980 | 1985 | 1990 | 1995 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 175,605 | 172,999 | 132,763 | 239,047 | 242,247 | 281,237 | 248 ,623 |
If you have sheep/goats eating plants at a rate faster than the plants can re-grow, and you end up with a denuded landscape. The barren landscape of quite a lot of the Eastern Med. is entirely caused by our poor land management practices.
All this to say, the Cyclades you see now aren't even what they looked like a few generations ago. In antiquity, the problem was likely deforestation for fuel and general land clearing.
Some sources and interesting reads:
Aegean and Western Turkey sclerophyllous and mixed forests
Landscape Ecology and the End of Antiquity: The Archaeology of Deforestation in South Coastal Turkey
Deforestation during the Roman period
Mediterranean Desertification: A Mosaic of Processes and Responses
I worked on an archaeological project in the Cyclades a couple of years ago. The island we focused on, Keros, is uninhabited today, largely due to its barren, waterless environment (though an elderly farmer did live alone there up until his death several years ago; his donkey still roams heartbreakingly around on its own).
In answer to your question, the island was populated in the past, being especially famous for it's Bronze Age Cycladic figurines, which were particularly known to inspire a certain Pablo Picasso. In the course of our exploration of the island, there were the skeletons of riverbeds dotted around that were metres deep, which would have once contained a large amount of running water on the island. At some point climate change would have resulted in these drying up, I would say at some point after the Byzantine era as there was evidence of considerable occupation during this time. I'm sure the increased urbanisation of Europe from 1500- probably played a role also, as people left the rural communities and thus maintaining them less.