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Land Use and the Human Impact on the Environment in Medieval Italy Modern Narratives About Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIX:3 (Winter, 2019), 419–444. Edward M. Schoolman, Scott Mensing, and Gianluca Piovesan Land Use and the Human Impact on the Environment in Medieval Italy Modern narratives about changes in the Italian landscape during the early Middle Ages have often been based on assumptions about changing demography; the loss and replacement of complex Roman economic, political, and agricultural systems; and broader changes in climate. This study focuses on the area of the Velino basin north of the city of Rieti (approximately 75 km northwest of Rome, Figure 1) at the local level. Its integration of archaeological and historical data with the reconstruction of ecological conditions derived from fossil pollen allows for a nuanced reinterpretation of human activities on the landscape. In a close examination of two discreet periods, this combination of evidence offers new insight into changes from small-scale agricultural production to a greater reliance on silvo- pastoralism (the raising of livestock within managed woodlands) driven by new economic and agricultural priorities during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The rapid transformation and deforestation during the ninth century is associated with an inten- sification of cultivation precipitated by a long-term accumulation Edward M. Schoolman is Associate Professor of History, University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy: Hagiography and the Late Antique Past in Medieval Ravenna (New York, 2016); “Vir Clarissimus and Roman Titles in the Early Middle Ages: Survival and Continuity in Ravenna and the Latin West,” Medieval Prosopography,XXXII (2017), 1–39. Scott Mensing is Foundation Professor, Gibson Professor of Geography, and Director, Office of Undergraduate Research, Dept. of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno. He is a co-author of “2700 Years of Mediterranean Environmental Change in Central Italy: A Synthesis of Sedimentary and Cultural Records to Interpret Past Impacts of Climate on Society,” Quaternary Science Reviews,CXVI(2015),72–94; “Historical Ecology Reveals Land- scape Transformation Coincident with Cultural Development in Central Italy since the Roman Period,” ScientificReports, VIII (2018), article 2138, doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-20286-4. Gianluca Piovesan is Professor of Forest Ecology and Management and of Landscape Ecological Forest Planning, Department of Agriculture and Forest Sciences, Università della Tuscia. He is a co-author of “The Potential of Paleoecology for Functional Forest Restoration Planning: Lessons from Late Holocene Italian Pollen Records,” Plant Biosystems, CLII (2018), 508–514; “Human and Climatically Induced Environmental Change in the Mediterranean during the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age: A Case from Central Italy,” Anthro- pocene, XV (2016), 49–59. © 2018 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01303 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01303 by guest on 30 September 2021 420 | SCHOOLMAN, MENSING, AND PIOVESAN Fig.1 Map of the Rieti Basin, with Lago Lungo and the Abbey of Farfa and Spoleto (Map by Luca Di Fiore) of territory under more centralized control (best evidenced in monastic records) and subsequent changes in the intensity of its management. Most of these alterations to the landscape run coun- ter to the prevailing climatic conditions, further underscoring the success of human management of the environment. These findings differ from those that stress the effects of changes in climate that are broad in their geographical scope, which can overlook the fact that continental and even regional patterns of climate change can have dramatically different effects dependent on local variations. Furthermore, human management of the land can also be independent of, or resistant to, these broader trends. Yet, traditional narratives synthesized from medieval records Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01303 by guest on 30 September 2021 LAND USE IN MEDIEVAL ITALY | 421 and archaeological excavations are forced to rely on assumptions about the effects of changing population dynamics and transfor- mations in social and cultural Roman practices as causes of human use or disuse of the landscape, without corroborating evidence.1 An often-overlooked complement to these approaches is the analysis of paleoecological reconstructions, especially as derived from a chronological assessment of pollen from lake sediments. High-resolution sedimentary records offer evidence, within the range of a decade, of the ecological changes in the areas surround- ing lakes or wetlands that derive from both changes in climate and human modification of the landscape. Despite the value of this approach, especially in understanding the role of humans, paleo- ecologists have often been primarily reliant on physical proxies to reconstruct landscape change without turning to other sources (in this period, medieval texts or archaeological excavations). Climate change is typically the default explanation for rapid environmental change, sometimes leading to the collapse of societies or econo- mies, but without a detailed understanding of the sociopolitical circumstances under which environmental change takes place. This reliance on climate has also reverberated strongly among histo- rians. By combining evidence from these distinctly different research approaches—historical, archaeological, and paleoecological—we are likely to achieve more complete explanations for abrupt environ- mental change, especially at local levels. Thus, we can fill in the gaps left in the historical and archaeological records about landscape use, while also viewing the effects of medieval sociopolitical priorities.2 1 For the decline of the Italian population during this period, see Elio Lo Cascio and Paolo Malanima, “Cycles and Sability: Italian Population before the Demographic Transition (225 B.C.– A.D. 1900),” Rivista di Storia Economica, XXI (2005), 12–13; for evidence of population dynamics, Irene Barbiera and Gianpiero Dalla-Zuanna, “Population Dynamics in Italy in the Middle Ages: New Insights from Archaeological Findings,” Population and Development Review,XXXV(2009), 367–389. 2 The reliance on physical proxies has been slowly reversing in interdisciplinary studies. See William V. Harris, “What Kind of Environmental History for Antiquity?” in idem (ed.), The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History (Boston, 2013), 1–10. Examples of broadly conceived studies that maintain a focus on early medieval Europe include Michael McCormick et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIII (2012), 169–220; Ulf Büntgen et al., “Cooling and Societal Change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 A.D.,” Nature Geosci, IX (2016), 231–236; John Haldon et al., “The Climate and Environment of Byzantine Anatolia: Integrating Science, History, and Archaeology,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLV (2014), 113–161. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jinh_a_01303 by guest on 30 September 2021 422 | SCHOOLMAN, MENSING, AND PIOVESAN The early medieval period remains an especially tantalizing platform for this combination of approaches, in part because the political, cultural, and ecological changes seem so dramatic. The written sources often provide limited evidence regarding landscape use, and archaeological surveys offer only outlines of settlement pat- terns. The application of data derived from changes in the landscape itself, in this case the pollen preserved in lake sediments, enables us to reconsider, challenge, or corroborate assumptions derived from approaches reliant on single forms of evidence. Our research about the Rieti basin is by no means the first to bring these features together (even for early medieval Italy). How- ever, it benefits from a high resolution of pollen analysis and rich documentation, much of it related to, or in the possession of, the Abbey of Farfa and the territory of the Lombard dukes of Spoleto—a region that has already undergone a significant archaeological survey. In taking this area as a test case, this article examines the contexts and factors that may have led to abrupt environmental changes during two discreet periods, c. 600 to 750 and 850 to 900, as they relate to the effect of human interaction with the landscape. According to the pollen record, the first period marks a distinct and purposeful reduction in woodland due to an intensi- fication of silvo-pastoralism (the keeping of livestock, in this case likely pigs, in managed woods), itself contemporary with economic and cultural changes instituted with the establishment of the Lombards in the region.3 The second period includes a transition from secondary wood- land to grassland accompanying a shift to hilltop settlements and further concentration and consolidation of land under monastic and ecclesiastical control (in this case, Farfa and its records play an 3 For analysis of the lake-core data from Rieti, see Mensing et al., “Effects of Human Impacts and Climate Variations on Forests: The Rieti Basin since Medieval Time,” Annali di Botanica, III (2013), 121–126; idem et al., “2700 years of Mediterranean Environmental Change in Central Italy: A Synthesis of Sedimentary and Cultural Records to
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