One such strategy was poly cropping or intercropping, whereby farmers planted different crops on the same plot of land. This made the most productive use of a plot of land in all seasons and helped to ensure that even if adverse conditions caused one plot to under-perform the land would still be productive in another season. Olives, cereals, and pulses were harvested at different times, for example, and could be planted alongside one another.Figs mixed well with olives or with vines, so these could also be planted side-by-side.Poly cropping also occurred in household gardens, where cereals and a variety of vegetables were grown together.Another strategy was land fragmentation, meaning rural populations owned small plots of land in different places. This allowed them to spread their risk across different micro-ecologies, so adverse conditions in a given year on one of their holdings did not result in a total loss. Diversification also meant Greek populations were “pluriactive,” meaning they undertook activities beyond agricultural production. They were not simply farmers —they also kept livestock and they engaged in seasonal skilled and unskilled manual labor.Greeks also turned to other resources beyond those they produced themselves. Rural Greek populations knew that they could not depend on agricultural production alone to meet the needs of their subsistence, so they also relied on “marginal landscapes” in order to obtain other resources. In times when traditional sources of livelihood under-performed,fodder system for sale rural populations had to be ready to exploit other resources provided by different micro-ecologies.
Depending on the characteristics of the micro-ecology, there were different alternative sources of food. Lakes, rivers, and the sea could be turned to, for example, for fish, starfish, and eel. Other environments might provide tortoises, fowl, or game. Collecting wild greens, or horta, was a very common strategy throughout the Greek world.The other two imperatives, as mentioned above, were to store and to redistribute. Whenever a resource was produced in excess of the needs of the family at a given time, the surplus could either be stored or exchanged. It could be stored and thus saved for a time when other sources of production under-performed, and then it would buffer against the risk of subsistence failure in the future. Alternatively, it could be exchanged for other useful commodities that were necessary for survival.All of these strategies were developed to maximize the potential for meeting one’s family’s own subsistence needs every year. As such, we can say that subsistence was the norm—it was the goal that every peasant household aspired to achieve. In an ever-uncertain world, rural Greek populations sought to minimize their exposure to the risk that they might fail to marshal all the resources necessary for their survival. Scholarship on the historical ecology of the Mediterranean and on so-called traditional agricultural practice stumbles over the nineteenth century and collapses in the twentieth century. Horden and Purcell acknowledge that their model of the Mediterranean as a patchwork of shifting, interdependent micro-ecologies is difficult to apply in the modern period. They acknowledge that “Mediterranean history” ends sometime in the nineteenth or twentieth century, although they are uncertain when the shift occurred and what caused it.Grove and Rackham run into a similar problem.
They argue forcefully against what they call the “ruined landscape” theory—that the Mediterranean landscape was more lush and fertile in ancient times, and modern Mediterranean people degraded the land with their unscientific use of it. Their thesis is that human actions are not to blame for environmental changes in Mediterranean Europe. Mediterranean ecologies are resilient and constantly changing; fires and erosion are natural aspects of the Mediterranean and not a result of human misuse; “badlands” is a misnomer; and a lack of forest is not the same thing as deforestation. This argument certainly has its merits, but Grove and Rackham downplay the significant changes that have occurred since the nineteenth century. The literature on the historical ecology of the Mediterranean depicts a timeless, unchanging Mediterranean region from antiquity to the modern era. In this way, it replicates a pitfall of the related historical and anthropological literature on Mediterranean agricultural practice. If the Mediterranean ecology was unchanging, so, too, were human interactions with it. Scholars studying the ancient past have used ethnography of contemporary Greece to supplement literary sources and material culture. To better understand ancient farming practices, for example, they studied contemporary farming practices. John Campbell and Ernestine Friedl pioneered the field of ethnography of Greece, conducting field research in rural settings in Greece in the 1950s and recording their observations of rural Greek populations’ concepts of honor and shame, gender roles and family structure, and agricultural practices.There has been a tendency to treat these studies a historically as representing “traditional” Greek society, as if their descriptions of Greek village life could be applied equally to the 1950s, the 1850s or the fourth century BCE.
Susan Buck Sutton has called this approach “survivalism,” in which, “The nineteenth or twentieth century existence of a folk song, ceramic vessel, or farming technique similar to that of antiquity has been taken as proof of unbroken continuity.” This approach has been replicated in other disciplines, such as ethno-archaeology.It also fits well with Greek nationalist historiography, folklore studies, and Romanticism—endeavors for which an unbroken Greek cultural continuity from ancient times to the present is expedient. Ethnography has certainly been a useful way to fill in the gaps left by the limitations of other sources. Studying the ancient past through analogy to the present, however, has had its drawbacks, and more recently, this approach has come to be challenged. As Paul Halstead has argued, “Emphasis on relatively timeless constraints… of environment , technology and perhaps know-how has encouraged uncritical extrapolation to antiquity. Traditional practice was highly variable, however, and demonstrably shaped also by medium-term historical contingencies and cultural preferences and by short-term tactical decision-making.”It is now recognized that the Greek countryside and Mediterranean farming practices were contingent on a multitude of factors. As Halstead argues, there has been a tendency to overgeneralize Mediterranean farming practices, and there was, in fact, a great diversity of practices. Different regions in the Mediterranean imposed different material constraints—e.g. based on climate, terrain, and quality of soil—but many more factors also influenced farming practices. Individual factors also mattered a great deal, such as one farmer’s specific production goals, his strength and skill, the size of his plots, and the distance of his plots from his home. As Halstead writes, “Individual farmers often do things differently, because they are more or less industrious, conservative, proud, burdened with dependents to feed, or blessed with “hands” to help.” Based on these factors, individuals made different choices. Rich farmers with lots of land left more of their land fallow; poor farmers farmed every inch they could afford to.Finally, cultural factors need to be accounted for. Diversity in farming practice also results from different cultural “ways of doing.” There were many local customs that influenced farming practices, and not all of them were grounded in practical considerations.In sum, ethnography is a useful tool for postulating about farming practices in the past, but only when it is considered alongside other sources and when the contingencies of rural Mediterranean life are kept in focus. Among the larger contingencies that affected Mediterranean ecology and agriculture over the medium-term were economic, demographic, and climatic changes. As I examine next,fodder growing system the influence of these factors needs to be taken into consideration in order to understand the changes that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. The dynamism of the Mediterranean countryside is well illustrated by an examination of long-term changes in settlement patterns, crop regimes, and climate. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the population of the Peloponnese—and of the Mediterranean basin in general—was concentrated in the lowland plains, which were the center of economic activity, and the main crops were cereals, especially wheat. Then, beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century and lasting until the middle of the nineteenth century, a new settlement regime became dominant as populations shifted away from low-lying plains and became more concentrated in the hillsides and mountains of the Mediterranean. Grain cultivation moved out of the Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean returned to the cultivation of its “civilizational crops,” i.e. vines and olives.The shift of the economic and demographic center of the Mediterranean from its low lying plains to its hills and mountains occurred at the interface of two larger processes. The first was a drop in the annual average temperature, often referred to as the Little Ice Age.
Estimates vary, but this Little Ice Age lasted roughly from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century in the Mediterranean. The Little Ice Age was a period of “several phases of cool summers and cold, snowy winters.”During this period, there were also several clusters of extreme weather events in Mediterranean Europe, including floods and out-of-season rain, droughts, and especially cold winters—the worst decades were the 1540s, the 1560s to the 1640s, the 1680s to the 1710s, and the 1810s. These weather events often resulted in failed harvests, frequent famines in much of Europe, and favorable conditions for certain diseases, such as malaria and plague. The cause of the Little Ice Age is unknown. Alpine glaciers advanced at times during this period due to successive heavy snowfalls followed by cool, late springs—this could explain extreme weather events in the Alpine Mediterranean, but not in the southern Mediterranean. Other possible explanations include volcanic eruptions, sunspot minima, a shift in the anticyclonic belt of the Northern Hemisphere similar to the one that caused the Medieval Warm Period that preceded the Little Ice Age, or some combination of these factors. Whatever the cause, this change in the climate of Europe and the Mediterranean made the cultivation of lowland plains more difficult and less predictable. In Mediterranean Europe, the colder average temperature meant a shorter growing season in the summer and a wetter climate overall. Due to increased fluvial discharge, the best croplands in the low-lying plains were waterlogged for a longer segment of the year. As Faruk Tabak has written, the lowland plains “were largely deserted and taken over by swamps, wetlands, and reeds—not to mention the fauna that thrived in such environments: the mosquito, snakes, storks, and lizards.”During the Little Ice Age, making wetlands suitable for habitation and cultivation was an expensive, labor intensive task. Drainage works needed constant upkeep, and they could be swiftly undone by an unexpected deluge. Furthermore, the risk of malaria made it a dangerous endeavor, and land reclamation needed to be done on a sufficiently large scale to eliminate the risk of malaria from nearby fields. This was the world that Braudel described in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II in which he wrote, “To colonize a plain often means to die there.”With the beginning of the Little Ice Age, permanent settlements moved from lowlands to highlands, and temporary settlements , “mushroomed throughout the basin.”The second factor that caused population to become more concentrated in upland areas was the transplantation of American crops to Europe and of old world crops to the Americas—a process often referred to as “the Columbian exchange.”In the seventeenth century, landand labor-intensive “oriental” crops, especially cotton and sugar, moved out of the Mediterranean and to the Americas, where there was plenty of land to exhaust and slave labor to exploit. From the 1650s on, sugar production shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic , and sugar production was much greater there. In the fifteenth century, Cyprus exported a few hundred tons annually; in the seventeenth century, Jamaica exported 72,000 tons annually.In addition, grain production moved out of the Mediterranean and was relocated to large estates in Eastern and Central Europe, also with coerced labor. In the sixteenth century Mediterranean, the grain trade was 100,000 to 200,000 tons. In the seventeenth-century Baltic, the grain trade was 600,000 tons.Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, American crops were being introduced to replace sugar, cotton, and grains. The American crops that were introduced—e.g. tobacco, maize, and beans—could be grown at higher altitudes in the Americas, and they similarly thrived in the highlands of the Mediterranean basin.As populations were forced to relocate to higher altitudes by the inhospitable conditions of the Little Ice Age, the crops that justified lowland settlement in the first place disappeared from the basin, and upward relocation was facilitated by the availability of new crops that thrived at higher altitudes.