Warm Soil, Westerly Wind, and Wet Feet: Feeling and Measuring Ecological Time in the Roman World

Abstract

Although climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation are contemporary problems, these are also challenges with deep historic roots in antiquity. 2,000 years ago, during the Roman Climate Optimum, a period of unusually warm, wet, and stable temperatures in the Mediterranean from roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE, the Romans altered the natural environment so greatly that they produced a level of pollution that was unparalleled until the Industrial Revolution. It is precisely in this contradictory time of unusually productive growth and destruction that we discover a blossoming of textual and visual ecological calendars illustrating how the Romans experienced the changing Mediterranean seasons. Roman agricultural treatises instruct us on specific agricultural tasks based on celestial movement, the arrival of particular winds, and on corporeal sensations, such as the warmth of the soil. Literary texts from the period portray kinship and shared corporeality between farmers and plants, with parent farmers listening to and assisting plant‐children in achieving their desires. The concept of measuring time by means of the human body and its sensations is most explicit in the agricultural mosaics of the Late Roman period, which depict enslaved workers laboring, sweating, stomping, plowing, and performing seasonal tasks. While much of the conceptualization of indigenous ecological calendars is framed within the context of modern states, juxtaposing ancient predecessors and contemporary practices offers a new perspective on this topic.

Rhythms of the Earth—Editorial Introduction

“…Ecological calendars are a manifestation of embodied knowledge systems that measure and give meaning to time based on close observation of one's habitat (Kassam et al, 2018(Kassam et al, , p. 250, 2021. Human societies have used such calendars (often in combination with solar or lunar calendars) for hundreds of years and potentially millennia (Kassam et al, 2011;Tally-Schumacher, 2023). By engaging with the interactions among physical phenomena (such as the first snowfall or last frost) and biological events (such as blossoming of specific trees, arrival of migratory birds or mammals, appearance of plants or insects), human societies have been able to identify optimal time windows for their livelihood activities.…”

“…Rhythms of the Earth contains articles related to ecological calendars from the Arctic to North Africa, ranging in time from the Roman Empire to contemporary Central Asia. The Special Issue includes archeological evidence of ecological calendars in regions of the Roman Empire, specifically the Mediterranean approximately 2000 years ago (Tally‐Schumacher, 2023 ). In “Warm Soil, Westerly Wind, and Wet Feet: Feeling and Measuring Ecological Time in the Roman World,” we are shown historical evidence of the universality of context‐specific insights related to human experience of the seasons across time and space.…”

“…It is important to keep in mind that archeological (Tally‐Schumacher, 2023 ), ethnographic (Kassam et al., 2011 ), and biocultural evidence (Ferrara & Ingemark, 2023 ; Kassam et al., 2022 ; Rozzi et al., 2023 ) shows that ecological calendars have been in use for hundreds of years if not millennia by human societies. Clearly, there has been climatic and environmental change throughout this period.…”