Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 401
people active in the Italian landscape after 400 and especially after 534 and the
Gothic War, meant each person had at her or his disposal a greater abundance
and range of resources than more people might have had. That, after all, is
what the relative health of skeletons recovered from Giovannini’s burial sites
imply. The abundance of available energy relative to the number of humans
meant that the post-classical appropriation of land, wood, and water resources
could be less intrusive and transformative than human interventions in the
‘high pressure demographic regime’ of Roman or high medieval times. In sum,
the ecological footprint of populations (the impact a community’s demand
for energy has on natural ecosystems) was slight and in some cases almost
undetectable in Ostrogothic, Eastern Roman, or Lombard Italy.43 Low human
densities in most Italian landscapes shaped a new dialectic between people
and natural resources in which extensive, as opposed to intensive, exploita-
tion was sufficient to support many rural communities. These extensive forms
of resource use, carried out by few people, left thinner traces when compared
with the more specialized and agriculturally oriented Roman or high medieval
systems of production.44
The economic imprint on the ecology was ‘extensive’ only metaphorically,
and the resource catchment of post-classical sites actually quite slight: the
total amount of energy each late antique individual used was likely smaller by
about a third than the energy exploited by their classical forebears, according
to one calculation.45 This can help to explain the acute difficulty archaeolo-
gists still have in discerning and analysing post-classical rural settlements and
their material culture, despite increasingly refined survey techniques. But one
consequence of the new ways humans fit into Italian landscapes is unmistak-
able. Like Lombard and eastern Roman Italy, Ostrogothic Italy on the whole
was a more sustainable Italy. Post-classical Italy was a distinctive ecologi-
cal phase in a long history of mutual influences and co-adaptation between
human, animal, and vegetable communities that began with Neolithic farming
in the 7th millennium BC. In the late antique peninsula, agricultural activities
were intermingled with pastoral and gathering activities in an exceptionally
43 On the concept of footprint and its application to pre-modern societies see Hoffmann,
“Footprint Metaphor”, pp. 291–6.
44 As Cam Grey notes (Chapter 10 in this volume), social inequalities continued to modulate
access to resources during the 5th and 6th centuries.
45 Durand, Les paysages, p. 380, proposed that “site catchment analysis” applies to medieval
circumstances, and that woodland resources had to originate within 6.5 km of their place
of consumption, which is another way to think about late Roman ecological footprinting.
See Morris, Why the West Rules, for an estimate of postclassical people’s energy consump-
tion (=20,000 kcal/day) compared to Roman (=30,000) or high medieval people (=27,000).