406 Squatriti
analyses tend to rehabilitate post-classical Italian societies and landscapes.63
The barbarized economies and ecologies of the 5th and 6th centuries seem
Edenic in the 21st.
People, Plants, and Animals
Of course the people of late antique Italy practised agriculture, raised domes-
tic animals, produced and exchanged surplus, and never became exclusively
reliant on wilderness resources. After all, wild animal bones seldom make
up more than 2 per cent of skeletal remains in post-classical middens.64 Still,
late ancient modes of production and reproduction created distinctive eco-
logical relations and landscape forms. From the 5th century a new balance
slowly developed between humans and aqueous as well as terrestrial resources
because fewer humans, subjected to weaker extractive systems, could afford to
exploit the land and seas in a different way than had the Romans. This balance
no doubt shifted between 400 and 600 as human numbers fluctuated, but the
deeper changes to extremely localized environmental relationships created in
Late Antiquity came later, after 1000.
One sign of the new way people sought out the resources they needed is the
precipitous decline of marine animal remains in domestic waste: whereas sea
creatures had often enough occupied tables, even quite far from the coast, at
the beginning of Late Antiquity, by the 7th century beyond the shore almost no
one ate marine creatures.65 The commercial networks that had made possible
the movement of biomass from the seas to the hills evaporated. The result was
more localized food procurement and consumption, with the emergence of
‘100-mile diets’ deriving from the weakening of the Roman state and aristoc-
racy rather than from gastronomic fashion, as today.
Post-classical ‘locavores’ also seem to have eaten less beef than their Roman
ancestors. The shrinkage in average bovine height began in the 3rd century
and has been correlated with the retreat of cereal agriculture: most bovines
in Roman Italy were draught animals, used to plough fields to be sown with
wheat or to haul cartloads to market, whose stature and muscle mass mattered
to their productivity. Only at the end of their working life were these oxen
butchered and eaten. Post-classical bone assemblages contain fewer bovine
bones, and of smaller cattle, than earlier assemblages, presumably because big
63 Maier, “A Farewell”, p. 289.
64 Salvadori, “Zooarcheologia”, p. 203.
65 Salvadori, “Zooarcheologia”, pp. 219–22. See also Squatriti, Water, ch. 4.