A Most Pleasant Scene and an Inexhaustible Resource: Steps Towards a Byzantine Environmental History

Description

Interdisciplinary Conference November 17th and 18th 2011 in Mainz. What do we know about the environments in which the Byzantine Empire unfolded in the eastern Mediterranean? How were they perceived and how did man and the environment mutually influence each other during the Byzantine millennium (AD 395-1453)? Which approaches have been tried up until now to understand these interactions? And what could a further environmental-historical research agenda look like? These questions were the focus of an interdisciplinary conference that took place on 17 and 18 November 2011 in Mainz. The present conference volume brings together contributions from researchers who have approached these issues from very different perspectives. They focus on the explanatory power of traditional as well as "new" sources and the methods of Byzantine Studies and Byzantine archaeology for this hitherto little-explored sphere. In this way, we see how closely environmental history is interwoven with the classical topics of Byzantine research - be they of an economic, social or culture-historical nature. A+++ Preface / Falko Daim 7 Introduction - Steps Towards an Environmental History of the Byzantine Empire / Henriette Baron 9 Steps Towards Landscapes 15 Siedlungsökologie und Landnutzungsstrategien im byzantinischen Osten / Rainer Schreg 17 Rural Byzantine Landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean: New Approaches to Characterisation and Analysis / Katie Green 35 Responding to Byzantine Environments: Then and Now / Marlia Mundell Mango 47 The Economy, the Countryside, Forts and Towns: The Early Byzantine Period on the Lower Danube during the 4th -6th Centuries AD / Andrew G. Poulter 79 Wilde und gezähmte Natur. Beobachtungen zur Wahrnehmung von Natur und Landschaft in der byzantinischen Literatur / Carolina Cupane 101 "Der Wald, ein Ort, der von Bäumen bestanden wird, der von Feuchtigkeit gedeiht, eine Anhäufung von Holz, ein Morast" / Stefan Albrecht 111 Unlocking Sources 135 Environmental Archaeology and Byzantine Southern Italy / Paul Arthur 137 Die byzantinische Kulturlandschaft - Kulturpflanzen als Indikatoren für byzantinische Mensch-Umwelt-Interaktionen / Anna Elena Reuter 149 An Approach to Byzantine Environmental History: Human-Animal Interactions / Henriette Baron 171 Exploiting the Landscape: Quantifying the Material Resources Used in the Construction of the Long-distance Water Supply of Constantinople / J. Riley Snyder 199 Byzantinisches Mönchtum und Umwelt / Johannes Koder 217 Die Wahrnehmung von Klima, Wetter und Naturkatastrophen in Syrien in den literarischen Quellen des 6.-9. Jahrhunderts / Klaus-Peter Todt, Bernd Andreas Vest 241 List of Contributors 273 Sigles Used 275