A tale of two deserts: Contrasting desertification histories on Rome's desert frontiers
A tale of two deserts: Contrasting desertification histories on Rome's desert frontiers
复制标题
两个沙漠的故事：对比罗马沙漠边境的荒漠化历史
DOI：
10.1080/00438240120107495
复制
发表时间：
2002
影响因子：
1.3
通讯作者：
G. Barker
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
G. Barker
了解“荒漠化”，即干旱土地生态恶化为半沙漠和沙漠，对于目前居住在干旱地区的世界五分之一人口的未来福祉至关重要。许多干旱地区现在只有零星的移动的或半移动的牧民居住，这些地区的考古遗迹表明，过去的定居和土地使用制度要密集得多，因此，考古学经常被纳入关于气候和人在造成荒漠化方面各自作用的辩论。虽然这项工作的大部分是投机性的，（在现代生态理论的旱地），而简单化，本文提出了一个罗马时期的解决方案和土地利用的罗马非洲和罗马阿拉伯半岛的沙漠边缘的比较研究。这两个地区提供了截然不同的旱地农业历史，这些历史在以下方面有所不同：它们的起源、发展和废弃;它们所处的帝国主义的社会和经济背景;农民对退化的看法和反应;土地利用对景观的影响规模;以及为管理荒漠化过程而制定的战略的长期成功或失败。这些截然不同的轨迹说明了景观考古学家如何能够为了解过去的荒漠化过程以及更广泛的荒漠化辩论做出贡献。
Understanding 'desertification', the ecological deterioration of arid lands into semi-deserts and deserts, is critical for the future well-being of the fifth of the world's population who inhabit drylands today. Many dryland regions now sparsely occupied by mobile or semi-mobile pastoralists have archaeological remains indicative of much more intensive systems of settlement and land use in the past, so archaeology has frequently been brought into debates about the respective roles of climate and people in causing desertification. While much of this work has been speculative and (in terms of modern ecological theory about drylands) rather simplistic, this paper presents a comparative study of Roman-period settlement and land use on the desert fringes of Roman Africa and Roman Arabia. The two regions provide contrasting histories of dryland farming that differed in terms of: their origins, development, and abandonment; the social and economic contexts of imperialism in which they functioned; farmers' perceptions of and responses to degradation; the scale of impact of land use on landscape; and the long-term success or failure of the strategies developed to manage processes of desertification. These very different trajectories illustrate how landscape archaeologists can contribute to understanding processes of desertification in the past, and to the desertification debate more generally.