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Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2019-01-04
Total Pages: 407
ISBN-13: 9004392084
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity brings together scientific, archaeological and historical evidence on the interplay of social change and environmental phenomena at the end of Antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, ca. 300-800 AD.
Author: Paul Erdkamp
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021-11-05
Total Pages: 669
ISBN-13: 3030811034
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Climate change over the past thousands of years is undeniable, but debate has arisen about its impact on past human societies. This book explores the link between climate and society in ancient worlds, focusing on the ancient economies of western Eurasia and northern Africa from the fourth millennium BCE up to the end of the first millennium CE. This book contributes to the multi-disciplinary debate between scholars working on climate and society from various backgrounds. The chronological boundaries of the book are set by the emergence of complex societies in the Neolithic on the one end and the rise of early-modern states in global political and economic exchange on the other. In order to stimulate comparison across the boundaries of modern periodization, this book ends with demography and climate change in early-modern and modern Italy, a society whose empirical data allows the kind of statistical analysis that is impossible for ancient societies. The book highlights the role of human agency, and the complex interactions between the natural environment and the socio-cultural, political, demographic, and economic infrastructure of any given society. It is intended for a wide audience of scholars and students in ancient economic history, specifically Rome and Late Antiquity.
Author: Alexander Olson
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-11-16
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 3030599361
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book illuminates Byzantines' relationship with woodland between the seventh and twelfth centuries. Using the oak and the olive as objects of study, this work explores shifting economic strategies, environmental change, and the transformation of material culture throughout the middle Byzantine period. Drawing from texts, environmental data, and archaeological surveys, this book demonstrates that woodland's makeup was altered after Byzantium's seventh-century metamorphosis, and that people interacted in new ways with this re-worked ecology. Oak obtained prominence after late antiquity, illustrating the shift from that earlier era's intensive agriculture to a more sylvan middle Byzantine economy. Meanwhile, the olive faded into the background, re-emerging in the eleventh and twelfth centuries thanks to the initiative of people adapting yet again to newly changed political and economic circumstances. This book therefore shows that Byzantines' relationship with their ecology was far from static, and that Byzantines' decisions had environmental impacts.
Author: William Bowden
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2006-12-31
Total Pages: 687
ISBN-13: 9047407601
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection of papers, arising from the conference series Late Antique Archaeology, examines the social and political structures of the late antique period and the ways in which they are manifested in the archaeological and textual record.
Author: John Salmon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-02-01
Total Pages: 299
ISBN-13: 1134841647
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity shows how today's environmental and ecological concerns can help illuminate our study of the ancient world. The contributors consider how the Greeks and Romans perceived their natural world, and how their perceptions affected society. The effects of human settlement and cultivation on the landscape are considered, as well as the representation of landscape in Attic drama. Various aspects of farming, such as the use of terraces and the significance of olive growing are examined. The uncultivated landscape was also important: hunting was a key social ritual for Greek and hellenistic elites, and 'wild' places were not wastelands but played an essential economic role. The Romans' attempts to control their environment are analyzed. This volume shows how Greeks and Romans worked hand in hand with their natural environment and not against it. It represents an outstanding collaboration between the disciplines of history and archaeology.
Author: Panayiotis Panayides
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Published: 2023-01-24
Total Pages: 589
ISBN-13: 1789258758
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Cyprus was a thriving and densely populated late antique province. Contrary to what used to be thought, the Arab raids of the mid-seventh century did not abruptly bring the island’s prosperity to an end. Recent research instead highlights long-lasting continuity in both urban and rural contexts. This volume brings together historians and archaeologists working on diverse aspects of Cyprus between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss topics as varied as rural prosperity, urban endurance, artisanal production, civic and private religion and maritime connectivity. The role of the imperial administration and of the Church is touched upon in several contributions. Other articles place Cyprus back into its wider Mediterranean context. Together, they produce a comprehensive impression of the quality of life on the island in the long late antiquity.
Author: T. P. Wiseman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006-01-26
Total Pages: 476
ISBN-13: 9780197263235
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject matter from contemporary poets' exploitation of Greek and Latin authors, via newly discovered literary texts and art works, to modern arguments about ancient democracy and slavery, and close readings of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. This engaging book reflects the current rejuvenation of classical studies and will fascinate anyone with an interest in western history.
Author: Lukas Thommen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-03-08
Total Pages: 199
ISBN-13: 1107377862
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In ancient Greece and Rome an ambiguous relationship developed between man and nature, and this decisively determined the manner in which they treated the environment. On the one hand, nature was conceived as a space characterized and inhabited by divine powers, which deserved appropriate respect. On the other, a rationalist view emerged, according to which humans were to subdue nature using their technologies and to dispose of its resources. This book systematically describes the ways in which the Greeks and Romans intervened in the environment and thus traces the history of the tension between the exploitation of resources and the protection of nature, from early Greece to the period of late antiquity. At the same time it analyses the comprehensive opening up of the Mediterranean and the northern frontier regions, both for settlement and for economic activity. The book's level and approach make it highly accessible to students and non-specialists.
Author: Thomas S. Burns
Publisher: MSU Press
Published: 2012-01-01
Total Pages: 454
ISBN-13: 0870138987
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Recent publications on urbanism and the rural environment in Late Antiquity, most of which explore a single region or narrow chronological niche, have emphasized either textual or archeological evidence. None has attempted the more ambitious task of bringing together the full range of such evidence within a multiregional perspective and around common themes. Urban Centers and Rural Contexts seeks to redress this omission. While ancient literature and the physical remains of cities attest to the power that urban values held over the lives of their inhabitants, the rural areas in which the majority of imperial citizens lived have not been well served by the historical record. Only recently have archeological excavations and integrated field surveys sufficiently enhanced our knowledge of the rural contexts to demonstrate the continuing interdependence of urban centers and rural communities in Late Antiquity. These new data call into question the conventional view that this interdependence progressively declined as a result of governmental crises, invasions, economic dislocation, and the success of Christianization. The essays in this volume require us to abandon the search for a single model of urban and rural change; to reevaluate the cities and towns of the Empire as centers of habitation, rather than archeological museums; and to reconsider the evidence of continuous and pervasive cultural change across the countryside. Deploying a wide range of material as well as literary evidence, the authors provide access not only into the world of élites, but also to the scarcely known lives of those without a voice in the literature, those men and women who worked in the shops, labored in the fields, and humbled themselves before their gods. They bring us closer to the complexity of life in late ancient communities and, in consequence, closer to both urban and rural citizens.
Author: William V. Harris
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2013-07-25
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13: 9004254056
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Scientists, historians and archaeologists are at last beginning to collaborate seriously on studies of the long-term history of the environment. The fruit of an international conference held in Rome in 2011, The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History brings together scientists and scholars who are interested in the interaction of their several disciplines as well as in specific problems such as the effects of climate change and other environmental factors on historical developments and events, the sources of the energy and fuel used in ancient civilizations, and the effects of humans on the lands around the Mediterranean. The collection balances broad Mediterranean-wide studies and tightly focused studies of particular regions in Italy and Jordan.
