An Archaeology of Resilience in Rural Landscapes of Southern Italy, c. 300-1000
Date
2024-01
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Abstract
Developing an archaeology of resilience is crucial for understanding the dynamics of past social systems and the paradox that arises between societal collapse and regeneration and the apparent longevity of rural lifeways. The landscape of Southern Italy provides a robust historical case study in which to understand the role that resilience plays in human decision-making in the rural world during the collapse of the western Roman Empire. The panarchy metamodel provides a robust suite of analyses in which to investigate this region focusing on the adaptive cycle heuristic to visualize social change and estimate relative capacities for resilience in human-environmental systems. These systems are further understood through the concepts of complexity science. When more explicit concepts of social change are brought into panarchy through social resilience and ecohistorical co-evolutionary perspectives, the adaptive cycle becomes a robust tool through which to explain social collapse and regeneration. Developing a panarchy requires an investigation of landscape on different spatial and temporal scales through the history and archaeology of Southern Italy over Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. To build the model, adaptive cycles of the political, economic, and urban systems are designed and considered to influence the development of the landscape. Additionally, a robust series of shocks and stressors to these systems must be made explicit. Environmental, climatological, military, and biological impacts are outlined in detail. Once this evidence is compiled and the panarchy is designed, it becomes a tool to aid in landscape analysis. Rather than apply this model to the southern landscape generally, the Basentello Valley provides a case study on which to test the heuristic capability of panarchy. The historical and archaeological evidence for this landscape is well developed for Late Antiquity and more meagre for the early Middle Ages, leaving interpretive potential for panarchy and its complexity perspective to help explain the development of this rural landscape. Panarchic analysis reveals that rural capacities for resilience are tied closely to the capacity for self-organization. Despite this, the collapse of the western Roman Empire deeply affected Southern Italy and collapsing political, economic, and urban systems made rural social change inevitable. A resilience perspective teaches us that trajectories of complex adaptive systems are impossible to predict and we can only understand them in retrospect. If the goal is to lessen the impacts of social collapse, a capacity for resilience through self-organization on local scales provides the best chance for regeneration to result in a sustainable present that learns from the past and prepares better for the future.
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Keywords
Landscape Archaeology, Resilience, Societal Collapse, Complexity Science
Citation
Munro, M. J. (2024). An archaeology of resilience in rural landscapes of southern Italy, c. 300-1000 (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.