Talk:Deforestation during the Roman period

This article looks like an undergraduate essay
This article looks like an undergraduate essay. The subject of deforestation is barely mentioned. The tone is one of low moral outrage. The topic would be very interesting if it included actual information about deforestation. The cititations list is way too short, and many important references are not cited. It appears to be composed of secondary source information only. Someone with more knowledge than I have of the primary sources should look at this.

Avram Primack (talk) 22:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * You are very true. Besides that picking just on the Roman Empire and forgetting that Carthage and the Hellenistic states after Alexander the great also had the same deforsetation practices. --91.141.55.250 (talk) 19:51, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Review of the BBC source suggests most of the article is a simple paraphrase of the BBC article. Someone should do this article properly please.

Avram Primack (talk) 22:37, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Article was produced as result of a project at University of Washington Bothell.Genisock2 (talk) 20:50, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

the current thinking in London by archaeologists is that the london landscape was denuded of forest before the Romans arrived. the evidence of this is te lack of dearth of aboral pollen. moreover there is evidence of resource management from early roman periods and considering that the trees felled where over 200yrs old in many cases, forest management must have been going on for some considerable time. towards the end of the Roman period dendrochrology becomes difficult as tree ring growth patterns are distorted by tree thinning practices that encourage growth. again forest management. however this does perhaps signal timber is a problem so the ideas on roman deforestation and economic impact are not invalid. But the whole premise of this theory is hardly canon ymmv. a more neutral piece is perhaps required Boris (talk) 14:19, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

This is complete nonsense. It doesn't look like an undergraduate essay; it looks like a grade-school essay. Nonetheless, I reverted it to a pre-moronic-commentary version.mcornelius (talk) 14:09, 20 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Thats a good start ;) The article is trying the classical "when the romans came, everything went bad" outlook. Thats a long term believe, but not reflected in modern research. The real picture of actual science is much more differentiated. First it seems that there was deforestation before the greek or romans had their share of logging before the romans came into power. The available data points to a phenomenon of landscape abandonment after 500/600 CE, as it is the likely explanation for alluvial deposition in some of the region’s river basins. The most supported scenario is population decline at the end of antiquity as a likely cause of landscape deformation. after having cleared the land and converted it into a well manicured landscape of terraced vineyards, olive groves, farms, and gardens in the Early Roman era, (the forests stayed on the higher grounds and wehre used and manicured as well, by large companies called latifundia) the inhabitants abandoned the land at the end of antiquity, thus permitting the artificially maintained landscape to decline.  Its as well probable, that some of the deforestation happened in modern times, e.g. between the 16. an 18. century respectuively in medieval times. However the pattern is not at all unanimously as e.g. northern medieval italy was much better at using and cultivating its natural ressources than the south. The romans built aquifers in regions, e.g. Tunisia that today are close to a desert.

Overall, the believe that deforestation was the reason for drier weather has been strong in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and gave way to a highly alarmist - 'desiccationist' discourse by the middle of the 20th century. This position is still popular with the popular press as well with numerous conservation agencies but has been discredited in the expert forestry and ecological literature since the 1920s.


 * Grove et al, Eco history of the med,
 * The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History
 * The Cambridge Economic History of Europe from the Decline of the Roman ... M. M. Postan
 * http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EH/EH414.html Science and the Desiccationist Discourse of the 20th Century Vasant K. Saberwal Environment and History 4(1998): 309-343
 * Landscape Ecology and the End of Antiquity: The Archaeology of Deforestation in South Coastal Turkey Nicholas K. Rauh Purdue University
 * Vegetation-Climate Interaction: How Vegetation Makes the Global Environment Jonathan Adams
 * John Harwick in Institutions, Sustainability, and Natural Resources, by Shashi Kant,R. Albert Berry
 * The Demography of Roman Italy: Population Dynamics in an Ancient Conquest Saskia Hin Serten (talk) 12:04, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Related Redirect
Um... why the heck does "Roman Period" redirect here? 93.172.122.165 (talk) 12:29, 10 February 2010 (UTC)


 * this has since been fixed. Roman Period now redirects to Roman Empire. Dialectric (talk) 01:58, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Floors
Floors of private dwellings, public buildings, and temples weren't usually made of wood, though presumably the upper floors of insulae (apartment buildings) were. This would've been true not only of characteristic Roman architecture, but local architecture. Floors in humble structures were often packed earth. In elite housing, even if they didn't have mosaics, the floors were stone or clay or such. But really, that is the least of problems here. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:01, 24 November 2012 (UTC)


 * Having looked up the reference, yes - it looks like the source was discussing urban architecture (apartment buildings) when talking of wood flooring. It should be clarified because it does sound silly as-is.Koppas (talk) 21:42, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Removed unfaithful quotations
I've removed a couple of long quotations which turned out to be restatements of the source material rather than accurate reproductions:. Some of the content might be good to put back in an abstracted form, but I don't have the subject matter expertise to do so. Sneftel (talk) 14:50, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Scope of the article?
Should it also cover the Eastern Roman Empire? Chidgk1 (talk) 06:38, 15 October 2020 (UTC)
 * , I think this would be an unnecessary widening of scope, based on how durable the Byzantines were. A survey of Roman Empire and Classical antiquity tells me that a cutoff of approximately the 6th century would apply here. Elizium23 (talk) 06:54, 15 October 2020 (UTC)