The Role of Climatic Fluctuations in the Development and Reduction of Agriculture in Asia Minor from the 4-th to the 7-th Century A.D.

Abstract

Over the past decades, archaeologists have unearthed many evidences of the existence of a prosperous rural world in the late ancient East. However, it was only very slowly that historians of late antiquity began to realize this phenomenon, and comprehensive studies of its agricultural and socio-economic aspects began to appear only in the last few years. One of the key factors that must have contributed to the unprecedented development of agriculture underlying the prosperity of the late Antique countryside was climatic fluctuations. Thanks to the growing amount of scientific data, in particular palynological and limnological studies, it is now possible to state with relative certainty that late antiquity was a period of unusual humidity in the climatic history of the Mediterranean, followed by particularly arid centuries of the early Middle Ages. This study evaluates the degree of influence of these factors on the development of agriculture, considering studies in regions of Southwestern Asia Minor (Lycia, Pisidia). In almost every case, the more favorable hydrological conditions of late antiquity greatly facilitated, if not encouraged, the expansion of cultivation on ecologically marginal lands, while this boom in agricultural production must have created incentives for the development of rural economies in areas with more stable natural conditions. These complex technological and socio-economic processes testify to the ability of the Eastern Roman society to skillfully respond to changing natural conditions, to which it owed the complexity and flexibility inherited from previous generations.