412 Squatriti
density and composition.85 For in the post-classical peninsula, the major cata-
lyst of change in the woods were people.
The Apulian Salento, for instance, whose evergreen forests had been slowly
reduced from the beginning of the first millennium, seems to have become
a vast olive grove in Late Antiquity, with “exponential increase” of Olea sug-
gested by pollens found in Lago Alimini’s deposits.86 The Tavoliere, meanwhile,
was a very sparsely wooded territory in Late Antiquity, with a few oaks, hazels,
and elms clustering along the banks of watercourses and atop hills in a region
cleared for pasture and arable use.87 Nearby in the Murge, where grain pro-
duction for export mattered less, and where transhumance and pastoralism
may have suffered from the contraction in the Roman state’s demand for wool,
the situation was different. Woodland here was abundant, but roads, streams,
and accessibility created a heterogeneous environment, exploited less or more
according to the ease of passage for resource removal, and nowhere so dense
as to become impenetrable.88 Contributing to this situation was the fact that
in temperate climates, the growth of dense woods requires the exclusion of all
browsers, usually by fencing, a challenge so great that several historical ecolo-
gists think the dominant type of Mediterranean woodland has almost always
been ‘open’, with grasslands among the sparse trees.89 The Apulian evidence
is symptomatic of the surprising variations between quite nearby landscapes,
but also of the trend for inland and coastal areas to develop different kinds of
woods. Grain flowed through Siponto from the post-classical Tavoliere, while
the upper Murgia was ‘marginal’ land, too difficult for late antique investors
to exploit agriculturally and hence colonized by trees, no doubt to the benefit
of the local peasantry and transhumant shepherds. Indeed Theoderic had to
chastise Apulia’s shepherds in a famous (but lost) inscription for wandering
among the trees too far off the beaten drove tracks.90 His concern implies the
presence of trees did not completely impede local land use. That is why in
Apulia and elsewhere in the peninsula, tree cover was so diverse.
85 Simmons, Environmental History, pp. 56–7.
86 Di Rita/Magri, “Holocene Drought”, p. 301.
87 Volpe, Contadini, pp. 48, 301.
88 Volpe, Contadini, pp. 285, 295, 300.
89 See Rackham, “Savanna”, pp. 1–24; Grove/Rackham, The Nature, pp. 68, 213–4, 225; Vera,
Grazing Ecology, pp. 371–8.
90 The inscription from Termoli, recorded in the 1800s, seems to describe south-central
Apennine situations: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 9.2826. Ostrogothic kings dealt
with shepherd mobility more rigidly than classical Roman predecessors: Totten, Thinking
Regionally, pp. 144–58. Theoderic did not approve of shepherds in woods apparently
because his government was invested in “spatial control” (ibid., p. 171).