The relationship between mankind and the environment has long been a rich and intriguing aspect in the study of history. Environmental changes and natural disasters have prompted cultural change and innovation. Humans have, in turn, left their mark on the environment, altering their landscapes physically and mentally, purposely and inadvertently. From the locations of successful cities and the effects of terracing and water engineering on the Greek landscape to Virgil’s creation of an idealized, if not idyllic, Italy, the environment often shaped and was shaped by economic, cultural, and religious practice in antiquity.

Landscapes and the environment are more than their physical manifestation. Indeed, the ways in which ancient authors used and were inspired by the environment are equally important: ancient historians were aware of the impact that environment, climate, or landscape might have on human events, while poets and agricultural writers reflected on the dual nature of the environment as both hostile and life-giving, and philosophers investigated the interrelation of man and nature. In modern scholarship, this integral connection between humans and the environment has long been a point of discussion, and is experiencing a new surge in popularity with the increasing connection of environmental research into classical studies.

This conference will explore how mankind conceived of and expressed its relationship with the environment, and how this relationship can be tracked in the archaeological, documentary, or literary record. 

 

Contact

For more information contact the organizers at classicsgoesgreen@gmail.com.

 

Visitor Information

Directions and parking information

 

Program

9:00 Welcome Remarks

(i) Dr. Peter Van Minnen

(ii) Amanda Pavlick

 

9:30-11:00   I: Mastering the Landscape: Romans, Gods and Others

9:30     (a)   Clara Bosak-Schroeder (University of Michigan): “Agriculture, War, and Ideal Ecological Behavior in Greco-Roman Ethnography”

10:00   (b)   Virginia Clark (Princeton University): Aemilius Paulus’ Tour of Greece: The Roman Appropriation of Greek Landscape in Livy”

10:30   (c)    Joshua Fincher (Yale University): “Narratives of cultural and environmental change in Nonnus' Dionysiaca”

 

11:00-11:20 Coffee break

 

11:20 - 12:20  II: Organizing Nature: Measurement and Management

11:20  (a)   Karyn Necciai (Boston University): “Geoarchaeological Investigations into Bronze Age Aegean Terracing”

11:50  (b)   Dan Bertoni (Harvard University): “Id opus geometrarum magis est quam rusticorum: Land Measurement in Columella's Res Rustica”

 

12:20 - 2:00 Lunch break

 

2:00-3:30  III: The Built Environment: Nature, Urbanization and Industry

2:00   (a)    Alex Knodell (Brown University) and Emilia Oddo (University of Cincinnati): “Shared Processes in Ceramic and Metallurgical Industries in Minoan Crete”

2:30   (b)    Martin Gallagher (University of Oxford): “Water, Settlement and Urbanization in Archaic Greece”

3:00   (c)    Joanna Papayiannis (Princeton University): “The Greek Courtyard House: Climate-Sensitive and Energy-Efficient Architectural Design”

 

3:00-3:45 Coffee break

 

3:45  Keynote Speech: Dr. Jeremy McInerney: “Where's the Beef? The (Sacred) Economics of Raising Cattle in Ancient Greece”

Abstracts

 

Clara Bosak-Schroeder, University of Michigan
“Agriculture, War, and Ideal Ecological Behavior in Greco-Roman Ethnography”

By comparing several ethnographies from the Greco-Roman world, including Megasthenes' fragmentary Hellenistic Indika and Tacitus' early Imperial Germania, this paper will demonstrate that Greek and Roman ethnographers value societies that carefully protect the land from the ecological damage of war.

Because Greco-Roman ethnographies situate their subjects in physical space and describe human institutions first and foremost in ecological terms, I will argue that they offer an especially rich reflection of how Greeks and Romans conceptualized and evaluated their own ecological behaviors. Of these ecological behaviors, agriculture and land-management figure prominently as subjects of ethnographic inquiry. 

As I will show, Greek and Roman ethnographers portray foreign peoples' agricultural behaviors in tension with their warriorship. This tension in ethnographic writing parallels the tension between war and agriculture in Greek and Roman literature at large, but whereas Greek and Roman poetry characterizes agriculture as the idyllic activity of a society at peace,

Greek and Roman ethnography focuses on how war threatens the safety of farmers and the fertility of the land.

A closer look, however, reveals the value ethnographic texts reserve for peoples able to balance both war and agriculture. The Germania admires German warriorship, but criticizes the Germani's neglect of the land. In the Indika, by contrast, agriculture is so valued that soldiers consider even enemy farmers sacrosanct. The ideal society that emerges from these texts is one in which war is taken for granted as a practical necessity and valued for the honor it can bring participants, but land-management is also elevated as a social and ecological good. 

 

Virginia Clark, Princeton University
Aemilius Paulus’ Tour of Greece: The Roman Appropriation of Greek Landscape in Livy.

The concept of Roman exploitation and manipulation of landscape and topography has been a fruitful line of study in recent scholarship, often focusing on monuments and physical constructions. In these studies Livy’s account of Roman history often plays a prominent role.

 Similarly with the expansion of Roman hegemony in the Mediterranean world, there have been numerous discussions of the way in which the Romans physically imposed themselves upon foreign landscapes.

Building on this research, this paper takes a detailed look at one part of Livy’s narrative of the Third Macedonian War in books 44-45. It examines the figure of Aemilius Paulus and his masterful control of the Greek and Macedonian landscape in these last books of Livy, and how that mastery represents a fundamental shift in power in the Romans’ favour at this time. 

I focus on the events surrounding the end of the war, the victory at Pydna and Paulus’ subsequent tour of the famous sites of Greece. At the end of the war, there are indications in Livy that the landscape itself favours the Roman conquest, and in some ways makes their victory easier. Throughout this section of Livy, there are also many interesting examples of the way that the Romans behave in the landscape, specifically how they make it more Roman. I look at the idea of the military camp as a mini-Rome, as well as at the assimilation in this section of Livy of Greek deities and sanctuaries to their Roman equivalents. These aspects of Livy’s account combine to suggest that the Romans’ ability to manipulate the landscape and make it their own, as well as the land’s (and its gods’) willingness to be conquered, are important facets of Rome’s success in creating an empire.

 

Joshua Fincher, Yale University
Narratives of Cultural and Environmental Change in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca

Nonnus’ Dionysiaca is a poem in which the natural world figures as a major force in two distinct ways. In my paper I will explore how Nonnus uses the environment as an object transformed by human and divine culture and agendas and how he gives voice to the environment by personifications which express nature’s point of view. The environment serves as a tool for Dionysus’ attempt to earn his place on Olympus by being transformed into a Dionysiac space in which the new craft of viticulture is supreme. Throughout the poem, Dionysus’ transformation of the environment is compared competitively to the simultaneous, transformative work of Aristaeus (5.215-289, 13.253-286), and Demeter (7.73-104); the poetic landscape is an environment in flux being altered and established as a world readied for human civilization. Nonnus employs the environment to illustrate how gods and humans prove and establish themselves by permanently altering their natural surroundings and the relative merits of these changes. The other function of nature in the Dionysiaca is as a character. The poem is populated by personifications of trees, springs, rivers, and rocks; these characters routinely comment both on the changes wrought by the poem’s characters and the events occurring in the poem. Sometimes these personifications attempt to escape destruction or comment on a cataclysmic natural event (2.94-162); at other times they actively influence the course of the narrative by intervening in the plot (22.90-117). Giving nature a voice encourages the reader to be sympathetic to the natural world and consider the events of myth-history from the earth’s perspective. It also reveals an understanding of the consequences of landscape change and allows it to assume an active role in the shaping of history. This paper will illustrate how Nonnus and Late Antique literature conceived of nature, alteration of the landscape, cultural progress, and nature’s role in myth-history. 

 

Karyn Necciai, Boston University
Geoarchaeological Investigations into Bronze Age Aegean Terracing 

 

This paper explores the research of primarily agricultural terraces built during the Bronze Age in the Aegean.  The initial construction, use, reuse, and abandonment of terraces in the high-relief peaks and valleys of the Aegean has been a subject of scholarly interest for centuries, but the ubiquity of the features and their persistent blending into the contemporary landscape has hindered investigations.  Inquiries into the chronology and construction methodology of ancient terraces have often come up against a brick wall.  To address this, the purpose, macrostructure, and utilization of ancient agricultural terracing are discussed.  As a way to more fully understand ancient terracing, recent geoarchaeological investigations are summarized at case study sites on Crete and Kythera, and future research goals for the study of Aegean terracing are presented that feature the disciple of micromorphology or the study of consolidated sediments and soils under the microscope.

The paper explores the benefits and services of geoarchaeological studies as part of the holistic scientific research design for archaeological investigations.  Specifically, the advantages of the established discipline of micromorphology are discussed.  Future plans for sampling at two Minoan-period sites on Crete are presented in terms of micromorphological analysis.  This practice can elucidate the nature of site formation processes and human spatial use.  Micromorphological analysis provides a finer grained resolution of the actions at play on an archaeological site and provides minute details relating to relative chronology, cultural and natural actions, construction methodology, sediment sourcing, and even human behaviors, e.g., trade.  Overall, micromorphological studies have the potential to highlight the often difficult to reconstruct relationship between ancient humans and their environmental milieu.      

 

Dan Bertoni, Harvard University
Id opus geometrarum magis est quam rusticorum: 
Land Measurement in Columella’s Res Rustica 

 

Extant Roman agricultural manuals display evidence of several debates about what agri cultura comprised. For instance, in Varro’s De Re Rustica there is a discussion about whether animal husbandry should be included within agriculture (I.2), and it is first excluded, then readmitted. Another such instance is the question of surveying, which is raised at the beginning of book five of Columella’s Res Rustica. Columella reports that he has been requested by Marcus Trebellius to include in his manual a de commetiendis agris ratio (5.1.2), and after some protest, Columella complies and provides a thorough account of the Roman units for measuring area, of formulas to calculate areas of fields of various shapes, and of methods to calculate how many plants to sow in a given field. Columella’s inclusion of these topics reveals an interest (and potentially a lack of knowledge) on the part of wealthy landowners in the details of how their slave-run holdings were delimited. 

 

The section also displays Columella’s engagement with Greek and Latin traditions of land measurement. The earliest extant Latin treatise on surveying is by Frontinus and survives as part of the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum, a compilation probably made in the 5th century CE (Campbell xx). On the Greek side, Columella follows the system of γεωδαισία, the most prominent surviving source of which is the mathematician Heron, who gives in his Metrica area formulas that are identical to the ones found in Columella (Heath 303). Heron’s exact dates are unknown: he may have been Columella’s contemporary or he may have lived centuries later. Therefore, although Columella’s section on land measurement is likely the earliest source on this topic, his account is influenced by two preexisting fields: the practical Roman science of surveying and the more theoretical Greek γεωδαισία. Thus, the opening sections of Columella book five shed light not only on the Roman concept of agri cultura but also on his skillful blending of Roman and Greek techniques for land measurement. 

 

Works Cited 

Campbell, B. 2000. The Writings of the Roman Land Surveyors. London : Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. 

Heath, T.L. 1921. A History of Greek Mathematics, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

 

 

Emilia Oddo, University of Cincinnati

Alex Knodell, Brown University

Natural and Social Production Environments in Minoan Crete:
Shared Processes in Ceramic and Metallurgical Industries

 

This paper explores the ways in which craft workshops function in the settlements and landscapes of Minoan Crete. We argue that the joint study of pyrotechnological industries offers a rich perspective on their impact on the social and natural environments. As case studies, we consider two ceramic and metal production centers in East Crete, specifically Malia’s Quartier Mu and Mochlos (including the nearby metallurgical workshop of Chrysokamino).  While Quartier Mu is a cluster of workshops in a palatial environment, Mochlos and Chrysokamino are smaller sites, not directly linked to a palatial environment. A chaine operatoire approach is particularly useful in teasing out aspects of ceramic and metallurgical production processes, and how they vary or coincide depending on their political and technological contexts.  By examining shared and divergent aspects of the chaine operatoire of metal and ceramic industries, with particular emphasis on resource and fuel procurement, furnace operation, and the circulation and deposition of finished products, we might begin to better understand the wider role of craft production as a socio-technological process.  For example, at Malia, metal and ceramic industries are spatially linked, both situated in Quartier Mu, probably on account of the unpleasant emissions of furnace operation; yet they also would have benefited from close proximity due to many shared needs. Although metallurgy and potting required different skillsets, a large amount of fuel would have been required for each, and ceramic furnaces and tuyéres were as necessary for metal production as they were for ceramic. Common exploitation of natural resources and spaces, however, requires careful planning and is hardly coincidental. We must therefore consider the complex mechanisms at play, and whether these collaborations self-organizing or driven by a palace-based political authority. Mochlos provides a divergent case for comparison. This paper thus examines how Minoan workshops shared and used their natural and social environments to address broader questions of social organization. 

 

Martin Gallagher, Oxford University
Water, Settlement and Urbanisation in Archaic Greece

Most scholars have downplayed the evidence for urbanisation in Archaic Greece, and indeed indications of planned development are limited at mainland sites throughout the period (e.g. Snodgrass 1980: 176-177; Morris 1991: 39-40.  At a few sites (e.g. Corinth, Eretria, Athens), however, there is evidence for major alterations in settlement patterns and structure at this time.  In each case, modifications of the landscape, particularly to harness or control water resources make these changes possible (F. Lang: 120-125, summarises the evidence but does not discuss its connection to settlement changes).  Aristotle (Pol. 1330b) emphasises the importance of the water supply alongside the laying out of roads in early city-planning.  

The evidence are clearest (and earliest) at Corinth where the construction of an extensive pipeline in the Middle Geometric period (ca. 825-750) and the provision of an early architectural context for its terminus at Peirene fountain helps to create a more nucleated settlement with a dedicated “North Cemetery” out of a dispersed array of small villages with associated burials and defined an axis of urban zoning maintained well into the Classical period (Donati 2009: (94-97).  Waterworks at Eretria and Athens likewise redefine areas once reserved for dispersed settlement and burial as public spaces around which more nucleated settlements form and often lead to monumental architectural development. (Camp 2001: 34-35; Vink 1997: 125-126).  Whilst the complex of factors behind these changes is unclear, it is difficult to avoid the implication that these projects constituted an organised effort to prepare these sites for a more centralised settlement.

CAMP, J.M. 2001. The Archaeology of Athens. London: Yale University Press.

DONATI, J.C. 2010. Towards an agora: The spatial and architectural development of Greek commercial and civic space in the Peloponnese. D.Phil. thesis, New York University.

LANG, F. 1996. Archaische Siedlungen in Griechenland: Struktur Und Entwicklung

MORRIS, I. The early polis as city and state. In: Rich, J. and Wallace-Hadrill, A. City and Country in the Ancient World. London: Routledge, pp. 25-58. 

SNODGRASS, A.M. 1980. Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment. London: J.M. Dent.

VINK, M.C.V. 1997. Urbanization in late Geometric and sub-Geometric Greece. In: ANDERSON, H.D. Urbanization in the Mediterranean: 800-600 BC . Copenhagen: Museum Tusculaneum, pp. 111-141.

 

Joanna Papayiannis, Princeton University
The Greek Courtyard House: Climate-Sensitive and Energy-Efficient Architectural Design

The Greek courtyard house is viewed by the majority of scholars as having been dark, damp and smoky, and, generally speaking, uninhabitable. Though the consensus is one which sees the houses of ancient Greece as unfit for habitation, there is an abundance of evidence to demonstrate that they afforded far more comfort for inhabitants than scholars acknowledge by employing what we today would call climate-sensitive and energy-efficient design principles. Data concerned with the way buildings are influenced by climate is in large part absent within the context of ancient Greece, but the quantity of potential evidence in the form of ancient texts, visual representations, archaeological remains, as well as contemporary ethnographic studies, suggests that green architecture is not a modern development. In Greek thought, there was an understanding of how to harvest the sun’s energy to generate pleasant and healthy living conditions, and visual representations illustrate the important role the open-air courtyard played for the household. The ancient city of Olynthus offers evidence for an overall plan in harmony with the seasonal position of the sun; the houses there would have been able to store solar energy in winter using a southern courtyard and to obstruct it in summer by means of a north portico. Traditional architectural forms are generally dismissed as being crude or primitive, yet they have been shown to generate a favorable interior environment by taking climate into account. In modern industrialized societies, heating and air-conditioning produce comfortable conditions regardless of climate, but they have resulted in architecture which adapts, rather than adapts to, its environment. Though the courtyard house has been singled out as substandard and unpleasant, the evidence suggests instead that without massive contributions from mechanical heating and cooling, it is contemporary housing that would be unfit for human habitation.