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climate, the environment and the economy 387
Environmental change is more current amongst the explanations
recently proffered for the decline of the Roman economy, and for understandable
reasons. 72 It is quite clear that, during the Roman period, farming
was everywhere intense, and that in all regions it was extended into marginal
areas that were previously uncultivated. In the process, a great deal of
clearance must have taken place. Did this perhaps cause erosion and soilloss
in the higher lands, and the consequent dumping in the valley bottoms
of enormous quantities of potentially damaging alluvium? Indeed, does
the over-intense exploitation of the land explain the remarkable
fluctuations in regional prosperity which I have outlined above, so that a
new region took over the mantle of intense agricultural exploitation until
it, in its turn, was ruined by the very process of wealth-creation? 73
This picture is certainly not just a figment of the ecologically conscious
imagination, since geomorphologists, studying the sequence of river sediments,
have found widespread evidence of a post-Roman phase of alluviation,
which dumped immense quantities of soil in the valley bottoms and
left a number of formerly coastal cities, like Ephesus, landlocked (as they
are today). However, it may be a mistake to see this evidence as conclusive
proof of a late Roman and post-Roman environmental disaster that can be
widely used to explain the period’s economic problems. Firstly, it is normally
impossible to establish, on the basis of the information currently
available, exactly when and over how long a period, within the very wide
‘late Roman and post-Roman’ periods, such alluviation took place – or even
whether the process had not begun earlier: Strabo, for instance, in the time
of Augustus, already gives a detailed account of the problems of siltation
in the harbour of Ephesus. 74 Sequences of alluvium are difficult to date,
and many more closely-dated cases are needed before we can satisfactorily
relate alluviation to economic decline.
Secondly, and more seriously, as with population decline, which we shall
investigate next, on closer investigation the links between human activity,
environmental decay and economic decline become complicated. Erosion
(and consequent alluviation) may, for instance, have been caused less by the
clearance of woodland cover to create fields and terraces than by the later
abandonment of these terraces and field systems. If so, erosion and alluviation
become as much a consequence as a cause of economic decay. Equally,
even if alluviation did cause very real problems for settlements like Ostia and
Ephesus, we need to question why, in late and post-Roman times, the inhabitants
did not respond to the challenge more successfully. If the human
resources of these settlements had been stronger, Ostia and Ephesus would
surely have coped with environmental change (just as successful cities survive
72 Greene (1986) 85–6. The pioneering Mediterranean-wide work was Vita-Finzi (1969).
73 As argued by Randsborg (1992) 13–14. 74 Strab. xiv.1.24.
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