Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity ed. by Adam Izdebski and Michael Mulryan (review)

Originally published in 2018 as two volumes of the journal Late Antique Archaeology, the articles collected in this book on the theme of "Environment and Society in the Long Late Antiquity" offer a useful, albeit eclectic, profile of this emerging field of historical inquiry. The book opens with a clear and cogent introductory essay that characterizes the late antique Mediterranean as a zone of rich environmental diversity ripe for interdisciplinary analysis with all the tools and resources available to historians of human interaction with the natural environment working in other periods and on different parts of the world. This industry is already well underway, as twin bibliographical essays on scholarship on the eastern and western Mediterranean attest. Students will be the primary beneficiaries of these two multi-author surveys, which are organized according to topics like agriculture, demography, husbandry, landscape history, trees and woodland, plague and disease, and climate.

Following these introductory contributions is a cluster of four articles under the heading "Regional Vegetation Histories: Overview of the Pollen Evidence." Each of these articles examines pollen evidence from the eastern, central, and western Mediterranean, as well as northern Europe, to make inferences about the change of land-cover and the rural economy in these regions between the Roman period and the year 1000. While most of the insights from these studies is impressionistic, it is noteworthy that the article on the eastern Mediterranean posits a rupture in the centuries-long record of tree-crop cultivation in Anatolia and the Levant in the seventh century, a period marked not only by bad weather, but by the invasion of Islamic armies.

With a jarring shift in focus, the next section offers two sections of "Case Studies," four situated in the "West" and four in the "East." Unlike the scientific macro-studies of pollen samples that preceded them, these articles present closely focused, archaeologically inflected studies of specific sites (such as Hadrian's Wall or a well-reservoir in Spain), localized ecosystems (such as the Burint lagoon in Albania), well-defined regions (such as southern Apulia, northern Anatolia, Lowland Britain, or the delta of Egypt), and, in one case, a city (Antioch). Ranging from the borders of Scotland to the eastern rim of the Mediterranean, these contributions are united by their scale rather than by their topics of inquiry, though many of them treat agricultural production and the human management of natural resources. What they lack in cohesion, they make up for in their suggestion of what we can gain by incorporating the insights of archaeological work into research centered on historical inquiry.

Historians will feel most at home in the hundred or so pages devoted to six articles organized under the heading "General Surveys." Here readers are treated to several essays on topics of broad interest, ranging from a multi-author piece on reconstructions of climate fluctuations in the first millennium; two papers on the relationship between climate change and disease in this period with attention to the sixth-century plague of Justinian (Timothy Newfield and Kyle Harper); a multi-author article on the transformation of settlement patterns and land use in Late Antiquity; and an essay on the introduction and circulation of foreign plant species in western Europe with an emphasis on rye (Paolo Squatriti). The only outlier is an anomalous case study concerning the procurement of wood for the city of Rome which would have fit better in the previous section.

Ranging from broad bibliographical surveys to specific case studies, this volume offers "a powerful demonstration of the extent to which environmental history, in all its forms, has come of age" (365). It does so at a cost, however. In its attempt to present between two covers so many examples of the practice of late antique environmental history written in numerous registers and professional idioms, each with varying degrees of accessibility, the book fails...