Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 403
An example of this sort of insertion of people into landscape might be the
7th-century dwellings excavated in the 1990s at Supersano in Lecce’s hinterland
that were occupied into the 9th century. These were simple ‘Grubenhäuser,’
huts with flooring below ground level and thatch roofs supported by wood
posts. The residents probably farmed a bit, exploited the local groves of oaks
(Quercus robur and Quercus erica, large trees at the southernmost tip of
their range in Apulia), and hunted deer in the winter, a sensible adaptation
to the forested landscape in an area where woods were actually rare (nearby
at Scorpo an open, savannah-type landscape with fewer trees prevailed).50
Another example is the tiny settlement at S. Filitica, near Sassari, where 7th-
century inhabitants combined a diet of the extremely large molluscs that
flourished along the shore with domestic animals, deer, and mouflon (Ovis
musimon).51 Such self-reliance and rejection of those ‘luxuries’ hard to grow in
local contexts (in Italy the variety of cultivated fruits definitely shrank in Late
Antiquity) had begun earlier. A mid 5th-century house near Allumiere in the
Tolfa hills north of Rome contained charred traces of its inhabitants’ autar-
chy: carbonized acorns, grass peas (Lathyrus sativus), broad beans (Vicia faba),
some barley, and a small amount of wheat.52
Scholars who observe this process of site selection and adaptation to
environmental conditions sometimes refer to ‘marginal’ lands and their late
antique abandonment. Marginality, however, is not an absolute description,
but a relative situation dependent on an array of local conditions: ecologi-
cal, social, and demographic. Marginality is therefore dynamic, and different
land becomes marginal or central in different conditions. In the post-classical
demographic slump, hillsides that had been de-marginalized by terracing and
other investments in the high demographic pressure regime of Roman Empire
became ‘marginal’ again to communities in need of land that did not require
artificial levelling and heavy maintenance for productive purposes (commu-
nities with less muscle power to apply over a wider selection of productive
spaces).53
50 Arthur/Melissano, Supersano; Arthur, “Grubenhauser”, pp. 171–7; Arthur et al.,
“L’insediamento”, p. 372, where overgrazing seems to have affected the landscape. For
the autochthonous/foreign origins of Grubenhäuser in Italy see Brogiolo/Chavarría,
Aristocrazia, pp. 103–6. A 6th-century Grubenhaus in downtown Siena: Francovich et al.,
“Scavi”, p. 285.
51 Rovina et al., “L’insediamento”, pp. 202–3.
52 Sadori/Susanna, “Hints”, pp. 390–2.
53 On terracing: LoCascio/Malanima, “Cycles”, p. 211; Grove/Rackham, The Nature, pp. 107–17.
See also McNeill/Winiwarter, “Breaking the Sod”, p. 1628.