Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 407
oxen were not as necessary. Gender ratios also suggest that post-classical cattle
were more likely to be involved in dairy farming. Pigs, meantime, remained a
steady presence in Italian agro-ecosystems, while sheep and goats made some
advances (these animals’ sizes changed little).66 All such data are averages and
do not reflect the immense heterogeneity that prevailed on the ground, where
even within a modest city like Milan there could be considerable discrepancies
between the animals butchered in different neighbourhoods.67 But the aver-
ages do give a sense of the broad transformations underway in the 5th and
6th centuries. Domestic animals moved short distances, mirroring localized
systems of supply: they did not need to range far for forage and pasture. They
were raised for protein, as meat or milk, or fibre, not for muscle power, as their
bodies and gender distributions suggest. And they were one of many different
ways people used the land.
Part of the new environmental equilibrium of the Ostrogothic period were
the considerably shrunken cities. Rome, as mentioned, was an exception, even
at 40,000 inhabitants a metropolis far outstripping other urban communi-
ties in the peninsula. It exercised an unparalleled economic and ecological
pull on a hinterland that the Gothic War had limited without eliminating.
While Theoderic may have brought the last lions from North Africa into the
Colosseum, Rome no longer could outsource ecological exploitation to remote
corners of an empire. Instead, its secular and clerical elites operated estate-
centred regional systems of supply.68 A 6th-century dump in the Forum was
full of the bones of young plump pigs and sheep, raised for meat and unusual
enough to suggest some of the privileges Rome might continue to enjoy.69
Ravenna also sustained a stable hinterland in Romagna well into the 7th cen-
tury, by which time other Emilian farms had changed utterly.70 But the very
substantial reduction of occupation visible in most other Italian cities from
400 onwards, and the new forms of habitation (wood and wattle, mud bricks,
extensive recycling of ancient materials and spaces) had environmental
dimensions.
66 Salvadori, “Zooarcheologia”, pp. 202–9. Hoffmann, Environmental History, p. 66, proposes
a different explanation for dwindling domesticated animal sizes.
67 Biasotti, Giovinazzo, “Reperti faunistici”, pp. 178, 181, 182.
68 Marazzi, “Da suburbium”, pp. 733–46. On exotic animals for the games see Fauvinet-
Ranson, Decor civitatis, pp. 366–7, 380–9. The Crypta Balbi excavations prove that Rome’s
elites in the latter 600s still had luxuries imported across the sea.
69 Delussu, “I reperti faunistici”, pp. 177–8. Some meat reached Crypta Balbi from quite far
away: wood grouse (Tetrao urogallus) and camel are not local animals.
70 Augenti, “L’Italia”, p. 29.