Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity

Adam Izdebski & Michael Mulryan (eds). (2019). Leiden/Boston: Brill.

This volume is focussed on how Late Antique societies affected the world around them and, in turn, how the world affected them. Such an inquiry is constructed through three central aims: (1) using an interdisciplinary approach towards the study of Late Antiquity (c. 300-800 C.E.) that includes the work of archaeologists, environmental scientists, and historians in equal measure, (2) showing how specific case studies from Late Antiquity can further the field of environmental history more widely, and (3) appreciating how environmental history can change and better our understanding of life in the first millennium C.E. The book is ambitious in the geographic scale it covers, discussing sites from Hadrian’s Wall to Northern Egypt, the Iberian Peninsula to Byzantium. It also addresses a wide range of topics including the spread of disease, food production and climate change. There is particular focus on palynology and the ways in which pollen can help track changes in vegetation and thus changes in land use.

Example quotation

In the case of Late Antiquity, defining the spatial boundaries for writing environmental history through culture rather than through physical geography, has important consequences. It means that we focus in particular on how a specific cultural and social system interacted with the diverse environments it was part of. In this book, therefore, we actually set out to explore what such diversity, paired with relative socio-cultural unity, means to our understanding of humanity’s interaction with the environment in the course of history.

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