402 Squatriti
heterogeneous landscape that was humanized (subordinated to current eco-
nomic needs and regulated by current demographic trends) but not human in
the sense of utterly transformed by economic processes.46
Thus, fewer people resulted in economic systems that interfered with nat-
ural systems relatively little and permitted the formation of ecologies with
low relative productivity (in terms of the amount of useful things humans
extract from them in proportion to their area), but high biomass, high bio-
diversity, and containing many long-lived organisms. Nevertheless, the ‘low
pressure demographic regime’ that emerged in the 5th century had other
consequences.47 The people settled in the Italian peninsula were better able
to choose how to live in the spaces at their disposal. Their land use, in other
words, could be selective and attuned to the unique ecological possibilities
of each locale. Compatibly with their cultural assumptions, they could opt
to neglect types of land and styles of cultivation that generated too little
energy in comparison with their demands for labour: thus both viticulture
and olive cultivation lost ground from the 6th century, and wheat made room
for less fastidious grains, including in southern areas where wheat had pre-
dominated during the Roman hegemony.48 Similarly, those naturally favoured
pockets of land where making a living was somewhat easier attracted inhab-
itants to whom, we should recall, the upheavals of the 6th century offered
new choices, and who could align their productive strategies with local
ecological potential.49
46 Leveau, “L’archéologie”, pp. 75–7, theorized natural/human/humanized landscapes. From
a different point of view so did Peterken, Natural Woodland, pp. 11–15, who sees the ‘natu-
ral’ deriving from Latin ‘nascere’ and containing in its initial state all the potential for
its subsequent development, equally natural. He proposes a “scale of naturalness” (p. 15)
along which Ostrogothic Italy would, I think, find itself at quite a remove from primordial
conditions.
47 For this vocabulary see Simmons, Environmental History, pp. 48–52. Hoffmann, “Medieval
Christendom”, pp. 63–4 outlines changes that occur when a natural system becomes an
agro-ecosystem.
48 Arthur, “Italian Landscapes”, p. 109; Castiglioni/Rottoli, “Il sorgo”, pp. 486–91. Curiously, at
the edge of an unusual wood in the Salento, a new 7th-century village practised viticul-
ture: Arthur et al., “L’insediamento”, p. 373. However, the villagers were almost autarchic
(pp. 376–7) and drew resources from within a walkable range.
49 In post-classical Boeotia the smaller population clustered in pockets of slightly more
favourable land, where it was relatively easier to carry out economic activities (so-called
Siedlungskammern: see Bintliff, “Reconstructing”, pp. 41–4). Similar demographically
modulated relocations of rural settlement might explain villa-village fluctuations in Italy.