Environmental History of Europe: week 10

Vocabulary flashcards covering the environmental history, agricultural adaptations, technological innovations, and soil transformations of Mediterranean and Northern Europe.

Fertile Crescent Agricultural Package

The suite of domesticated crops (wheat, barley, legumes like lentils) and animals (sheep, goats) that originated in Mesopotamia and spread across the Mediterranean and Europe.

Mediterranean Climate

An environmental regime characterized by hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters, with native forest that was sparse, open, and easily cleared by burning and grazing.

Goats (in Mediterranean ecology)

Mobile, tree-climbing grazing animals whose continuous consumption of emerging tree saplings prevented forest regeneration and maintained grass and scrub landscapes.

Granary of Rome

Flat, hot conquered regions of North Africa, including Egypt and the Nile Delta, that produced grain on large plantations to feed the center of the Roman Empire.

Aqueducts

Roman engineering structures designed with a gradual downward gradient to transport water from sources in the hills across valleys and directly into cities.

Roman Lead Smelting Pollution

Ancient atmospheric contamination from extensive smelting operations that entered the jet stream and was deposited in Greenland ice cores.

Białowieża Forest (Biewaevsky Puscharts)

One of the few remaining pockets of primeval lowland forest in Poland that shows what the wet, cool Great European Plain and European bison habitats looked like tens of thousands of years ago.

Throat and Girth Harness

An early Mediterranean horse harness that pulled high near the neck, constricting the horse's throat and breathing when straining under heavy loads.

Breast Strap Harness

An improved animal harness originating in China around 1,800 years ago that distributed weight across the chest, enabling horses to exert greater pulling strength through heavy soils.

Moldboard Plow

A heavy wheeled plow developed around 700 AD featuring a sod-cutting knife and a curved board that flipped over thick Northern European clay soil and buried crop residues.

Anthropogenic Soil

A soil whose physical structure and fertility are fundamentally altered or built up by long-term human activities rather than natural processes alone.

Plaggen Soil (Plug and Soil)

A deep, rich anthropogenic soil found in Northwestern Europe formed over generations by layering winter barn bedding made of cut heathland sod and animal dung onto farm fields.

Terra Preta

An anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon region that maintains a human-altered, fertile structure centuries and millennia after human occupation ceased.

Reciprocally Stabilizing Unit

The Northern European agricultural system in which keeping cattle and horses in barns during winter protected land and generated large quantities of dung to continuously replenish heavy clay soils.