Agrarian Landscapes of coastal Croatia: a view from Nadin-Gradina

Summary

Generalized models of Mediterranean agroecosystems often elide the specific historical and political contexts in which food production necessarily takes place. This paper presents new historical-ecological research currently underway at the multi-period settlement site of Nadin-Gradina near the Adriatic coast of southern Croatia, a typically "Mediterranean" landscape that has hosted a dynamic social-political history of repeated invasion, migration, and colonization by a variety of human actors. The Nadin-Gradina Archaeological Project is endeavoring to elucidate the complex life history of this settlement and local environmental impacts of urbanization from late prehistory to the modern era. Attempting to think beyond basic questions of "subsistence" and "adaptation," the research presented here asks how factors such as warfare and political destabilization were central in creating various configurations of land use and human-plant-animal relationships. A macrobotanical assemblage from our 2016 excavations is compared with other local datasets, including faunal remains, stable isotope data, and historical cartography, to develop hypotheses regarding historical continuity and variability in agro-pastoral practices. While broad historical continuities in the presence of economically important taxa are apparent at the regional level, our data begin to show marked diachronic variability the local level in usage of land and organization of urban-rural space.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17022