Archaic and Classical Greek Sicily by Franco De Angelis;

Author:Franco De Angelis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

1. From Foundation to Political Centralization

Agricultural Production and Wild Foodstuffs

There is enough ancient evidence to get a sense of the climate and landscapes encountered by the early Greek settlers in Sicily. This provides important background in assessing what Greeks had to work with in establishing their agricultural production and what wild foodstuffs were available.

The little work that has been done on Sicilian paleoclimatology fits into the larger pattern noted for the Mediterranean and temperate Europe in antiquity.23 Cool, wet weather emerged in the years around 800 BC and gave way in the Hellenistic period to a warmer, drier phase. Greek settlement in Sicily coincided, therefore, with a favorable cycle of rainfall that lasted for five centuries. There would have been less interannual variability in rainfall, resulting in more predictable moisture for farmers. The agricultural systems and the populations they could support were reliably served.

While the evolution of the basic climatic framework for this period is not in doubt, we do not have any ancient descriptive statistics to quantify what we mean by “cool,” “wet,” “warm,” or “dry.” This is often the case with the study of premodern climates, and to help remedy the gap scholars have combined any surviving ancient information with later statistics and conditions thought to be broadly similar.24 Thus it is legitimate to employ more recent statistics to get a glimpse of ancient conditions, be it levels of rainfall or temperatures, as an initial way out of this dilemma (Table 6a-b).

Table 6a The Dstribution of Temperatures (in degrees centigrade) within the Year for Six Sicilian Cities.

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