Agenda

Title: Understanding Past Landscape Change through Models, Proxies, and Historical Archives: The Case of Medieval Rieti, Italy

Speaker: Edward Schoolman, University of Nevada - Reno

Abstract:
Through interdisciplinary research, new insights have been made as to the various forces that shape landscapes over time. But there are major challenges in understanding premodern environmental change when the evidence appears in different scales and from different types of models, proxies, and historical records.  Models, including those for climate patterns, geology, and biogeography, offer expansive data sets for understanding the effects of patterns in annual and seasonal temperature and precipitation, geochemistry, and taxa distribution by altitude.  Environmental proxies, such as palynological archives and dendrochronology, offer local-scale perspectives on species and landscape type on the one hand, and summer temperature and precipitation records on the other. Finally, historical archives preserve both human attitudes to the landscape and perspectives as to its intended use.  When taken together in the cases of the ecological history of the medieval Rieti basin, these different projections reveal a complex story of managed landscape successions catalyzed by factors including continental climate changes and local political and economic drivers.

Bio Sketch:
Edward “Ned” Schoolman is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he teachings and publishes on the medieval world with a focus on the Mediterranean from the sixth to the 11th century.  His research topics have included late antique and early medieval cultural history, and his first book, Rediscovering Sainthood in Italy investigated the development of the cult of saints in Ravenna from the fifth to the tenth centuries. His current research extends in two main directions: the first is exemplified in the forthcoming Greek Identity and Culture in Early Medieval Italy, 500-1000, an investigation of difference making and cultural minorities in the early Middle Ages (under contract with Oxford University Press); the second on the intersections of premodern land management, climate, and environment made visible through pairing medieval historical and archaeological records with paleoecological archives.