Resilience Thinking and Landscape Complexity in the Basentello Valley (BA, MT), c. AD 300–800

Matthew Munro ()
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Matthew Munro: Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, The University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: Archaeological data for the transformation of late Roman rural landscapes in Southern Italy over the sixth to eighth centuries AD are often meagre. This record often provides little explanatory power in the context of understanding the collapse of Roman political and economic hegemony and the framework for the regeneration of these relationships in the early medieval countryside. Resilience thinking offers a robust suite of heuristics to help guide both method and theory in understanding the key socio-environmental relationships involved in this transformative process based on limited material evidence. Through insights gained from developing a panarchic perspective of the Basentello landscape between AD 300 and 800, both capacities for and strategies of resilience to landscape-scale shocks and stressors emerge as key patterns in this collapse process. To explain how these patterns emerge, resilience thinking employs narratives from complexity science by framing landscapes as self-organizing complex adaptive systems. It is through appreciating this complexity that archaeologists can revolutionize how we understand landscape-scale transformations, the role of resilience in landscape history and, more broadly, the nature of societal collapse.

Keywords: archaeology; resilience; Late Antiquity; Early Middle Ages; panarchy; adaptive cycle; complexity; collapse; regeneration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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