Ecology in the long view: Settlement histories, agrosystemic ecological performance

The recent Columbian polemic contrasted beneficial New World land use before 1492 with destructive Old World land management. Since archaeologists are uniquely equipped to document and model long-term settlement and land-use histories, there is both challenge and opportunity to empirically examine the ecological impact of particular agrosystems within long time frames. This paper examines the risk-minimization and ecological fine-tuning of the Mediterranean agrosystem, and its long-term ecological performance. The Mediterranean ecosystem is the product of millennia of co-evolution between the environment and human activities, but traditional land use has been conservative and ecologically adaptive, despite sporadic disequilibrium. The deviations from the norm pose a number of testable hypotheses for further examination, not only in the Mediterranean region but also in other areas such as the New World.