Reuter, Anna Elena
Einheit in der Vielfalt? Zur Kulturpflanzennutzung imByzantinischenReich unter besondererBerücksichtigung archäobotanischerUntersuchungen in Caričin Grad(Justiniana Prima)
Plants are of great importance in everyday human life, serving not only as sources of food, but also as a source of raw materials, building materials, fuel or feed for domestic animals. Different plant spectra can therefore provide insights into people's everyday lives, their cultural preferences or environmental conditions. The study deals with crop use in the Byzantine Empire based on archaeobotanical data and has two main foci: on the one hand, the archaeobotanical analysis of macroremains from the early Byzantine city of Caričin Grad in southern Serbia, on the basis of which the diet of the urban population as well as agricultural practices are reconstructed. On the other hand, a literature-based supra-regional and diachronic overview of crop use in the Byzantine Empire (395-1453) is given. In the evaluation at the regional level, characteristic features of crop use of each region and the respective epochs are elaborated against the historical background and the prevailing environmental conditions and then transferred into a supra-regional and diachronic overview.
A Most Pleasant Scene and an Inexhaustible Resource Steps Towards a Byzantine Environmental History: Interdisciplinary Conference November 17th and 18th 2011 in Mainz
What do we know about the environments in which the Byzantine Empire unfolded in the eastern Mediterranean? How were they perceived and how did man and the environment mutually influence each other during the Byzantine millennium (AD 395-1453)? Which approaches have been tried up until now to understand these interactions? And what could a further environmental-historical research agenda look like?
These questions were the focus of an interdisciplinary conference that took place on 17 and 18 November 2011 in Mainz. The present conference volume brings together contributions from researchers who have approached these issues from very different perspectives. They focus on the explanatory power of traditional as well as »new« sources and the methods of Byzantine Studies and Byzantine archaeology for this hitherto little-explored sphere. In this way, we see how closely environmental history is interwoven with the classical topics of Byzantine research – be they of an economic, social or culture-historical nature.
