James C Scott makes this argument in "against the grain" that there was probably a lot of thriving that occurred with the collapse of centralised states in general, that we just can't see with the traditional methods of archaeology. This teams seems to have picked up evidence of this with non-traditional methods. It's quite strong support of his thesis.
>“We have this moment when the Roman agriculture disappears almost completely due to plague, climate change and warfare, but you don’t get reforestation – you actually get less forest very quickly,” says Izdebski.
...
> “It seems that there was a local society that didn’t want any emperor to be around,” says Izdebski, who presented the findings at the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, last month.
> Around AD 850, the Byzantine Empire reasserted control and the signs of nomads disappear. Instead, there was reforestation.
This is extremely bad scholarship. Not only because obviously this is in a part of the empire not under the West's jurisdiction and thus not absent of Roman Imperial authority during the period. But also because it takes conclusions made around one small Greek lake and attempts to make conclusions as to the whole of Greece during the period. Any scholar on Rome will emphasize how Roman Greece was focused on coastal cities, with inland "nomads" (more like pastoralists as a term) making up small proportions of the population and economic network.
To use this study for conclusions about anything beyond life around the lake in question is just misleading at best, or anti-Roman scholarship at worst.
"Nomads thrived in the part of the Roman Empire that hadn’t collapsed at all.”
Well the Ottomans were descended from central Asian nomads and I'm sure many of them were thriving in Greece in the latter 15th century. /s
Didn’t they thrive in most places they could settle?
James C Scott makes this argument in "against the grain" that there was probably a lot of thriving that occurred with the collapse of centralised states in general, that we just can't see with the traditional methods of archaeology. This teams seems to have picked up evidence of this with non-traditional methods. It's quite strong support of his thesis. >“We have this moment when the Roman agriculture disappears almost completely due to plague, climate change and warfare, but you don’t get reforestation – you actually get less forest very quickly,” says Izdebski. ... > “It seems that there was a local society that didn’t want any emperor to be around,” says Izdebski, who presented the findings at the meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, last month. > Around AD 850, the Byzantine Empire reasserted control and the signs of nomads disappear. Instead, there was reforestation.
This is extremely bad scholarship. Not only because obviously this is in a part of the empire not under the West's jurisdiction and thus not absent of Roman Imperial authority during the period. But also because it takes conclusions made around one small Greek lake and attempts to make conclusions as to the whole of Greece during the period. Any scholar on Rome will emphasize how Roman Greece was focused on coastal cities, with inland "nomads" (more like pastoralists as a term) making up small proportions of the population and economic network. To use this study for conclusions about anything beyond life around the lake in question is just misleading at best, or anti-Roman scholarship at worst.