Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies - BCDSS

Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research

2026-03-31T00:00:00Z

Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research Foxhall Forbes, Helen; Fafinski, Matheusz; Halsall, Guy; Harland, James M.; Lawrence, Dan; Clarke-Neish, Kelly; Foxhall, Lin; Abballe, Michele; Borroni, Massimiliano; Lypiridou, Ismini; Monolopoulou, Vicky; Nikulina, Anastasia; Sypiański, Jakub; Fleitmann, Dominik A major challenge in the interdisciplinary study of past climates is ensuring that evidence and data relating to different disciplines are analysed effectively using appropriate methodologies. In 'Droughts and conflict during the late Roman period', Clim. Chang 178, 2025, Norman et al. argue that historical sources support their conclusions that drought contributed causally to the 'barbarian conspiracy' of 367CE and to other late Roman conflicts. Although historians have developed rigorous methodologies for effective analysis and interpretation of surviving texts, the authors outline no methodologies for dealing with the textual evidence. Further, there are issues with the historical 'conflict' and numismatic datasets and with their interpretation. We focus on four major evidential points: 1) the 'barbarian conspiracy', 2) the agricultural economy; 3) the 'conflict' dataset and 4) the coin dataset. Historical evidence relating to drought and famine in the late Roman Empire does exist: future interdisciplinary research may indeed offer interesting observations on the relationships between drought and conflict, but the textual evidence discussed by Norman et al. does not, and cannot, support the authors' assertions. Effective interdisciplinary research must allow all disciplines to engage on their own terms and with their own accepted standards of rigour.

In the land of the apu: Cerro Llamocca as a sacred mountain and central place in the pre-Columbian Andes of southern Peru

2023-05-24T00:00:00Z

In the land of the apu: Cerro Llamocca as a sacred mountain and central place in the pre-Columbian Andes of southern Peru Mader, Christian; Reindel, Markus; Isla, Johny; Behl, Martin; Meister, Julia; Hölzl, Stefan Cerro Llamocca is a mountain with a summit elevation of 4,487 m asl in the southern Peruvian Andes. This paper presents a first overview of recent archaeological and paleoenvironmental research in its vicinity, and introduces new results from archaeological surveys and strontium isotope analyses. Our survey data show how the wider Cerro Llamocca area comprises an extensive complex of archaeological sites, composed of different sectors with public, domestic, and funerary architecture and rock shelters, occupied throughout the pre-Columbian period from the Early Archaic to the European invasion in 1532. Despite the extreme living conditions of this high-elevation environment, Cerro Llamocca includes the oldest archaeological site hitherto recorded in the larger region: a rock shelter (PAP-969) on its south-eastern slope with evidence of human occupation in the Early Archaic period ~ 8000 BCE. Human activity in the Cerro Llamocca area reached its zenith in the Middle Horizon (CE 600–1000), at a time of a dry climate and when an expansive Wari state incorporated the worship of mountain deities into an imperial strategy to dominate local people. Our strontium isotope analyses of archaeological human dental enamel from a funerary rock shelter (PAP-942), alongside modern plants as reference data, indicate that the people buried here originated in the adjacent highlands. At a broader level, we study the roles of Cerro Llamocca as a sacred mountain or apu and central place over a long-term perspective, and how these functions integrated and focused religious, ritual, social, political, and economic activities over this high-altitude complex. Its central place function was linked to its sacredness, but also to its topography, provision of shelter, and geographical proximity to a range of critical resources such as water, creating resource dependencies that shaped socio-economic cooperation and exploitation. Although Cerro Llamocca has progressively lost many of these roles since the beginning of the colonial period, local communities continue to revere it as a sacred mountain today.

Julian’s Batavian campaign, an embezzlement trial in Britain, and barbarian access to the Annona Militaris

2025-01-08T00:00:00Z

Julian’s Batavian campaign, an embezzlement trial in Britain, and barbarian access to the Annona Militaris Harland, James M. In his Epitaphios for the emperor Julian, composed in Antioch at some point between 365 and 368, Libanius describes an embezzlement trial which was held most likely in A.D. 359, in which Julian ruled against the accused, defying the wishes of Constantius II’s Praetorian Prefect, Florentius. Libanius puzzlingly suggests that the trial prompted Julian’s campaign to restore fortresses in 359 in Batavia, to restore shipments of British grain being blockaded by barbarian forces, and there is some chronological confusion in other sources between this event and Julian’s campaign in Batavia in 358. Scholars have yet to explain the causal and chronological relationship between these events. This article suggests that Libanius’ narrative is a propagandistic representation of several distinct stages of the taxation dispute Julian fought with Florentius. With the aid of recent advances in our archaeological understanding of agricultural practices in Britain and on the lower Rhine, the article argues that in response to this dispute, Julian’s Batavian campaign was intended to disrupt longstanding access by barbarians on the lower Rhine to the later Empire’s military supply mechanisms. The article suggests further that this has significant ramifications for the emergence of Saxon piracy in the second half of the fourth century, and thus the roots of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ migration to Britain.

Historiography and Archaeology, the Adventus Saxonum, and the Politics of the Early Middle Ages

2024-12-12T00:00:00Z

Historiography and Archaeology, the Adventus Saxonum, and the Politics of the Early Middle Ages Harland, James M. In this interview, the editors and the interviewee discuss contemporary approaches to the study of ethnic identity in the context of the end of Roman Britain and migration to Britain from across the North Sea. A discussion of the interviewee’s attempt to problematise this issue in relation to the cremation cemetery of Spong Hill, Norfolk, is used to open up a wider discussion, which covers issues such as issues of empiricism and interpretation, misconceptions about what it means to correctly draw upon archaeological and historical source material in unison, and the mis/utilisation of the study of the early medieval past in its various forms in relation to contemporary political discourse in Britain around issues such as migration, ethnicity and identity.