Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 405
With a smaller bureaucratic state to support, and with a relatively unpreten-
tious ruling class to demand rents, in the 5th and especially in the 6th century
economic systems could arise that demanded less work, because in fact fewer
hands were available to do it.59 The emergent economic system was more effi-
cient in producing usable calories than were specialized agrarian regimes. The
intensifications needed in agro-ecosystems were based on the willingness to
spend energy (human and animal labour) to capture more usable energy in the
form of low biomass, short-lived pioneer plants. While humans took a much
higher percentage of available energy from such ecosystems than from the
more natural ones of post-classical times, such intensifications seldom make
sense to peasants and when they do, as Ester Boserup explained in a classic
essay of 1965, it is only in high-pressure demographic conditions.60
If 21st-century demographic reconstructions are right, or mostly right, this
situation was less an outcome of structural forces than of human agency, of
choices people made in how they inserted themselves into their environments.
In effect, what used to be called the barbarization of Italian societies corre-
sponded not to a regression or ‘decline’ into ‘natural’ demographic patterns
(disastrously high fertility and mortality), but to a transformation that resus-
citated conditions like those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers throughout Eurasia
during prehistoric centuries. Following an insight of Marshall Sahlins, some
anthropologists recognize in such human communities the original ‘affluent
societies’, endowed with better health, more leisure, and greater social equality
than most agrarian civilizations.61 In such analyses, the ancient hierarchies of
agriculture, pastoralism, and hunting/gathering no longer hold sway. Unlike
Procopius, who identified agriculture with civilization and as a barrier between
man and nature, or Hobbes for whom it was axiomatic that primitive lifestyles
were unhealthy, contemporary critics eschew developmental teleologies and
instead idealize the ecological relationships established by people (like late
antique Italians) who did not rely exclusively on farmland.62 Although there
is an element of wishful thinking in such reconstructions, which have been
satirized as the ‘Hippie Economy’ of the Dark Ages, environmentally informed
59 Bjornlie, “Law”, pp. 148–58, surveys Ostrogothic taxation.
60 Boserup, The Conditions. On peasant production priorities see Chayanov, Theory.
61 Cohen, Health, pp. 2–3 explains how 1960s anthropologists undermined the progressive
narratives of economic development. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics was classic enough by
1982 to inform Hodges, Dark Age Economics, p. vii.
62 Squatriti, Landscape, ch. 1. Simmons, Environmental History, pp. 6–8 belittles optimistic
views of ‘Green’ hunter-gatherers.