AN ARCHAEOLOGY
OF RESILIENCE IN RURAL LANDSCAPES
OF SOUTHERN ITALY,
C. 300-1000

Descrizione

This volume emerged from a doctoral thesis questioning the role of resilience in the collapse and regeneration of human societies over late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The approach adopted applies the panarchy metamodel and insights from complexity science to understand the role of resilience in landscape developments of Southern Italy. This region is an ideal place in which to develop and test this model: the archaeological, historical, and environmental data are well documented, and they demonstrate both breaks and continuities in human-environmental networks between the Roman and medieval worlds. Once the landscape evidence is presented and the panarchy is built, it becomes a powerful tool to aid in landscape analysis. The Basentello Valley case study presented here is only one example of how ‘resilience thinking’ can test old assumptions and ask new questions about this transformative period while providing researchers with a fresh perspective on societal collapse and regeneration.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Munro’s resilience
by Paul Arthur
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Tables
A Word About Spelling and Notations

I. PROBLEMATIZING AND ORIENTING RESILIENCE
1. Problematizing Resilience in Southern Italy
2. Considering a Landscape Perspective
3. The Southern Italian Landscape
4. The Complexity of Landscape and Collapse
5. Redefining Resilience
6. The Path Forward

PART I
FRAMING THE PROBLEM

II. COLLAPSE, REGENERATION, RESILIENCE, AND SCALE: THE PRECONDITIONS FOR A MODEL
1. Theorizing Collapse
2. Theorizing Regeneration
3. Deconstructing Resilience
4. Temporal Perspectives
5. The Preconditions for a Model

III. THE RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK
1. The Adaptive Cycle
2. Scaling a System: Panarchy
3. Characterizing Social Resilience
4. Constituting a Landscape Approach to Resilience
5. A Heuristic Framework for Investigating the Role of Resilience

PART II
BUILDING THE MODEL

IV. THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SOUTHERN ITALIAN LANDSCAPE
1. Establishing the Initial Conditions: The Rural Landscape of Late Roman Southern Italy
2. The Ecohistorical Regimes of the Southern Italian Landscape
3. The Value of Ecohistorical Regimes

V. FRAMING THE PANARCHY
1. Adaptive Cycles: The Political System
2. Adaptive Cycles: The Economic System
3. Adaptive Cycles: The Urban System
4. Visualizing Panarchy

VI. SHOCKS AND STRESSORS I: CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT
1. Climate History
2. Natural Dynamics and Environmental Disasters

PART III
LANDSCAPE ANALYSIS

VII. SHOCKS AND STRESSORS II: CONFLICT, DISEASE, AND FOOD SHORTAGES
1. Conflict in the Landscape
2. Disease and Food Shortages
3. Buffeting the Panarchy

VIII. A CASE STUDY IN RESILIENCE I: DATA FROM THE BASENTELLO VALLEY C. 300-1000
1. Notes on the Data
2. The Basentello Valley in the Roman Period
3. The Basentello Valley in Late Antiquity
4. The Basentello Valley in the Sixth Century
5. The Basentello Valley in the Early Middle Ages
6. Landscape Dynamics in the Basentello Valley: A Balance Sheet and Summary

IX. A CASE STUDY IN RESILIENCE II: INTERPRETING RESILIENCE IN THE BASENTELLO VALLEY
AND BEYOND, C. 300-1000
1. Connectedness, Potential, and Capacities for Resilience
2. Panarchic Analysis
3. The Strategies for Resilience and their Role in the Basentello Valley
4. Looking Beyond: The Role of Resilience in Rural Southern Italy from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages

PART IV
THE ROLE OF RESILIENCE

X. Archaeology, Resilience, Landscape, and Complexity
1. In Conclusion: Archaeology, Resilience, Landscape, and Complexity in Southern Italy
2. Insights from Collapse, Regeneration, and the Presumption of Resilience
3. Insights from the Resilience Framework
4. Insights from Building the Model
5. Insights from Conducting Panarchic Analysis at the Landscape Scale
6. The Future

APPENDIX A. Bibliographic Essay
APPENDIX B. Tables for the Survey Zone
REFERENCES CITED