Environment and society in the ancient world: New perspectives

Abstract

Recent scholarly interest in the environment would not have surprised Pliny the Elder, the great Roman polymath and naturalist. From his perspective, the world of history and human events was tightly linked to inquiry into the natural world. The environment was responsible first and foremost for the material conditions of human societies, but its importance transcended being a package of resources. Landscapes produced thinking about difficult questions of culture and difference, and generated metaphors, cosmologies, and maps of a social world. Natural phenomena were similarly of historical interest. For contemporary historians and archaeologists, the environment is no less seductive: like a palimpsest, environments encode histories. New scientific techniques have radically shifted our evidentiary record, and offered scholars ways of addressing previously unanswerable questions. (Pliny, who met his end studying the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, would likely be pleased that we now have robust tools for understanding the environmental impact of volcanoes.) The best histories to have emerged from this new emphasis on the ancient environment have nonetheless combined these new perspectives with the traditional toolbox of the ancient historian—in particular, close attention to written and material evidence. The emerging dialectic, then, between new questions and traditional techniques, has offered an opportunity. The papers included in this symposium provide only a snapshot of some of the best aspects of this new and exciting moment: written by scholars working across multiple disciplines, across geographic regions, and over diverse chronological periods, they ask us to consider the historiographical consequences of thinking about relationships between the human and the natural—if indeed this is a relationship to be interrogated, rather than an analytical construct which obscures other modes of knowing. Pliny would have approved.