Feral Fields of the Eastern Adriatic Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On Mediterranean islands and coastal areas of southern Europe, extensive field systems of drystone walls, terraces, and clearance cairns are common landscape features that attest to generations of landscape modification for cultivation. Tracing the precise chronologies of these fields is perennially challenging. While field “architecture” may perdure in the landscape for centuries, the agroecologies and labor practices contained within it changes historically. The living landscape and paleoenvironmental datasets can be mutually informative for understanding complex historical ecologies of agrarian spaces. This paper discusses contemporary in situ observations of abandoned and semi-managed olive groves on a Croatian island (Ugljan, Zadar archipelago) together with new archaeobotanical evidence for the regional intensification of olive-focused arboriculture under Roman colonization in the early first millennium CE. I argue for attention to ferality and feralization as essential historical dynamics of agrarian landscapes. Fields do not necessarily represent clear-cut boundaries between wild or unmanaged spaces and landscapes of domestication and control. Shifting imperial political economies over millennia have periodically reorganized relations between human and plant life in the Adriatic, sometimes prompting abandonment of traditional crops. Yet former fields and former crops may persist in the landscape, taking on new forms of economic value and cultural meaning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33126