Did We Stop Throwing Away the Garbage? Negating Urban Collapse at Elusa in the Sixth Century CE (original) (raw)
Related papers
2019
The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Le-vant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire. ancient urban trash mounds | societal collapse | Late Antique Little Ice Age | Byzantine period | southern Levant
The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth-seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Le-vant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time-space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire. ancient urban trash mounds | societal collapse | Late Antique Little Ice Age | Byzantine period | southern Levant
PLOS ONE, 2020
Sustainable resource management is of central importance among agrarian societies in marginal drylands. In the Negev Desert, Israel, research on agropastoral resource management during Late Antiquity emphasizes intramural settlement contexts and landscape features. The importance of hinterland trash deposits as diachronic archives of resource use and disposal has been overlooked until recently. Without these data, assessments of community scale responses to societal, economic, and environmental disruption and reconfigu-ration remain incomplete. In this study, micro-geoarchaeological investigations were conducted on trash mound features at the Byzantine-Early Islamic sites of Shivta, Elusa, and Nesanna to track spatiotemporal trends in the use and disposal of critical agropastoral resources. Refuse derived sediment deposits were characterized using stratigraphy, micro-remains (i.e., livestock dung spherulites, wood ash pseudomorphs, and plant phytoliths), and mineralogy by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Our investigations detected a turning point in the management of herbivore livestock dung, a vital resource in the Negev. We propose that the scarcity of raw dung proxies in the studied deposits relates to the use of this resource as fuel and agricultural fertilizer. Refuse deposits contained dung ash, indicating the widespread use of dung as a sustainable fuel. Sharply contrasting this, raw dung was dumped and incinerated outside the village of Nessana. We discuss how this local shift in dung management corresponds with a growing emphasis on sedentised herding spurred by newly pressed taxation and declining market-oriented agriculture. Our work is among the first to deal with the role of waste management and its significance to economic strategies and urban development during the late Roman Imperial Period and Late Antiquity. The findings contribute to highlighting top-down societal and economic pressures, rather than PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.
The Final Blow: A Survey on the Impact of Justinianic Plague on Late Antique Byzantine Urbanism
University of Birmingham Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman & Modern Greek Studies - 22nd Annual Postgraduate Colloquium, 2023
Justinianic Plague hit Constantinople and Asia Minor in 541 and occurred in different waves until the eighth century, causing severe demographic, economic, and political consequences for the empire. For urban landscapes, the scale of influence was different everywhere. Some cities relatively protected their urban “texture”, while the plague caused a tendency of “ruralisation” among society in specific settlements. In this paper, the influence of the plague on the development of Byzantine urbanism will be investigated in collaboration with other relevant environmental, political, and economic factors. Constantinople and Sagalassos will be examined as case studies by their urban development process and reaction to the plague to see diseases’ influence on cities with different urban scales through available literary sources and archaeological data. Literary evidence describing the epidemic is strong for Constantinople, and the city appeared as a successful example of maintaining its urban occupation with the help of being the imperial seat, despite the harsh demographic and economic consequences. On the other hand, Sagalassos will be presented as an example of a discontinued urban settlement after the Justinianic Plague, even though there is a significant problem with the availability of sources concerning the plague’s presence in the city. Considering Constantinople and Sagalassos went through similar periods of urban development, despite the scale and political reality, my main argument here will be that diseases can be influential either directly or indirectly on the fates of cities as being the “final blow” by weakening societies’ will to sustain the urban landscape.
To be published in: Martin Bauch - Gerrit J. Schenk (eds.), The Crisis of the 14th Century: ‘Teleconnections’ between Environmental and Societal Change? (Das Mittelalter, Beihefte), forthcoming 2018 (peer reviewed) Based on a survey of written and palaeo-environmental evidence, this paper explores various aspects of possible interplays between climatic and socio-economic change in the Byzantine Empire as well as beyond in the Eastern Mediterranean in the period from between the collapse and “restoration” of Byzantine rule in Constantinople (1204-1261 CE) to the beginning of enduring Ottoman expansion in the Balkans in 1352 CE respectively the outbreak of the first wave of the “Black Death” in 1347 CE. For this purpose, various older scenarios of “fatal” social and political developments in Byzantine history will be confronted with new proxy data from regions across the Balkans and Asia Minor and compared with developments in other polities of the region during the transformation from the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” to the “Little Ice Age”.
A Companion to the Environmental History of Byzantium, 2024
Published online 4 March 2024: https://brill.com/display/title/24910 (ed. Adam Izdebski and Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Brill 2024, 570 pp.) How did humans and the environment impact each other in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean? How did global climatic fluctuations affect the Byzantine Empire over the course of a millennium? And how did the transmission of pathogens across long distances affect humans and animals during this period? This book tackles these and other questions about the intersection of human and natural history in a systematic way. Bringing together analyses of historical, archaeological, and natural scientific evidence, specialists from across these fields have contributed to this volume to outline the new discipline of Byzantine environmental history. Contributors are: Johan Bakker, Henriette Baron, Chryssa Bourbou, James Crow, Michael J. Decker, Warren J. Eastwood, Dominik Fleitmann, John Haldon, Adam Izdebski, Eva Kaptijn, Jürg Luterbacher, Henry Maguire, Mischa Meier, Lee Mordechai, Jeroen Poblome, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Abigail Sargent, Peter Talloen, Costas Tsiamis, Ralf Vandam, Myrto Veikou, Sam White, and Elena Xoplaki
The Crisis of the 14th Century, 2019
This paper discusses written historical documentation and paleoenvironmental evidence in order to explore connections between climatic and socioeconomic change. It focuses thereby on the Byzantine Empire and the eastern Mediterranean more generally in the period between the collapse and "restoration" of Byzantine rule in Constantinople (1204-1261) and the beginning of Ottoman expansion in the Balkans in 1352, which roughly coincided with the outbreak of the first wave of the "Black Death" in 1347. The paper entails juxtaposing various older scenarios of "fatal" social and political developments in Byzantine history with new studies based on proxy data from regions across the Balkans and Asia Minor and comparing these events with developments in other polities of the region during the transformation from the "Medieval Climate Anomaly" to the "Little Ice Age."
Waste disposal processes and landfill management are crucial subjects in the field of settlement archaeology. Our study is focused on the reconstruction of the community economy in the context of the Late Bronze Age; understanding the processes that led to the filling of these features; reconstruction of the recycling system of building materials (daub and wood) and the waste management. These research questions were addressed based on plant macroremains, charcoals, phytoliths, starch, micromorphology, phosphates and magnetic volume susceptibility. The results showed the waste character of features infills which reflected specific economy and habitats around the single households. The composition of the archaeobotanical assemblages was not determined by the type of feature, however similarities in the plant spectra could often be observed in the infill of features that were located close to each other. Charred remains of firewood inside the assemblages, also contained a proportion o...