10/28 lecture

mediterranean!

• north africa is hilly

• levantine, desert, etc. these are very diverse landscapes

• these are all connected via the sea

  • makes agriculture easy too

    • all you need is a boat. this also relates to maritime archaeology

Mediterranean food

• olives, olive oil, hummus, cheese, grapes, etc

• diet is also described in the reading

Mediterranean land change

• sea levels, etc

• 8kya

  • island shrinks due to ice melting in the holocene (warmer)

  • land creation

    • human manipulation: people add land over time

• Roman port

  • rome was inland

  • they used the port of Ostia, but there’s now new land so it was on the coast in ancient times, but now it’s also inland

the roman world

• legacy

  • architecture (ex ucla)

  • times new roman

• 8th-6th centuries BCE

  • mediterrean = greeks, etruscans, phoenecians (east greece)

• etruscans

  • put greek pottery into their tombs

• Rome, 753 BCE

  • scrappy lil settlement.

  • 292 (greece), 200 (spain)

    • they use seapower to get resources at these places over time

    • also tunisia, eastern greece, then levant, turkey

    • ~90 BCE they get organized at home lol, this Is when they actually become an empire

    • then Netherlands, then egypt

roman leadership

• communication with army

  • ex. communication to northern England roman troops

• trade

  • some local and conquered people adopted the culture well

• cultural links

  • useless vs useful architecture

    • ex. arches

  • collosseum, aqueducts (useful)

    • collosseum-inspired el jem in Tunisia

  • colonized deities are kinda integrated into culture (ex. egyptian one draped in a toga)

  • poetry

water

• important for

roman resource management

1. local water management (dams, canals, aqueducts close to Rome)

2. bringing in grain grown in other regions like Egypt and North Africa, with surface water (rivers) more reliable than rainfall

reading

• a virtual water network of the Roman world

  • using water networks far away to grow crops, transport the crops

• “The freshwater resources embodied in food production and traded among regions is known as virtual water (VW) (Allan, 1998)” (Dermody et al. 2014:5025).

• Factors in virtual water redistribution

  • political power

  • economic power

• Dermody et al. model

  1. estimated 200 kg of grain/person per year

  2. OTHER FACTORS: took into account water loss through evaporation under specific climate conditions in different parts of the Roman Empire, along with temperature and rainfall

  3. examined ratio of rainfed vs irrigated crops

  4. calculated labor time required (man hours?)

  5. calculated travel time

• Dermody et al. assumptions

  1. climate and rainfall rates hadn’t changed much and that they can use 20th century data as a proxy

     1. but they also note that Roman period was “anomalously warm (p. 5030).

     2. fields were cropped continuously for 2 years and then a fallow (rest) year

     3. land quality was based on slope

        1. flat = better

     4. model only looks at cereal crops (wheat)

     5. emphasis on water transport

     6. information flow was slow

• dermody et al. conclusions

  • “as demand increases, a VW-poor node must import from further away in the network” (p. 5033)

  • “the heterogeneity [variety] of the Mediterran environment was important for providing the Romans with resilience to interannual climate variability” (p. 5034).

    • RISK!

  • “VW redistribution during the Roman period facilitated populations, particularly urban areas, to overshoot their ecohydrological carrying capacities” (p. 5035).

    • relates to complex societies