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Colloquium - Consuming Ecologies:

Environment and Society in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

29 March 2025

9am-6pm

Julis Romo Rabinowitz Room A17 and hybrid via Zoom

This one-day workshop aims to investigate late antique and early medieval ecologies as unfolding socio-environmental formations. Recent scholarship has highlighted some of the messy ecological entanglements that gave root to political ideologies and homegrown squashes across the Mediterranean world—feeding hairy pigs alongside persistent imageries. Digging deeper into the matter of ecologies, this workshop explores the emergence of socio-environmental assemblages in the past through the prism of consumption. The undetermined precarity of ecological forms that characterise the present is not merely a feature of capitalist modernity. It is indebted to the longue durée entanglement of individuals and communities with non-human forms of life. The colloquium therefore poses the question of how different forms, materialities, commitments, and ideologies of consumption in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages endangered ‘consuming ecologies’: that is, socio-environmental formations emergent out of human appetites that simultaneously swallowed human and non-human labour, knowledge, and lives. What lifeways, spaces, and practices arose as a result of living in devouring formations, co-created by people, non-human animals, climatic events, things, states, plants, and geological forces?

Since the concept of ecologies asks us to bring together evidence traditionally studied by different disciplines, the workshops will gather scholars working in different fields (history, archaeology, palynology, literature, papyrology etc). Our goal is to facilitate conversation about ecologies and consumption across disciplinary, temporal, and geographical boundaries. Each speaker is therefore invited to present a case study of their choice drawn from around the late antique and early medieval world that they consider to have purchase on the concept of consuming ecologies. 

Presentations consider the following questions:

• What landscapes are produced through consumption? What is the built and un-built infrastructure that underpins acts of consuming (from farms through shores to palaces and villas)? Who are the key actors involved in the generation and maintenance of these landscapes? How do they end?
• How are producing and consuming communities situated in biophysical environments (fields, quarries, fisheries, vineyards, cities) constituted and reproduced through labour relations? What is the role of exploitation and violence in consuming ecologies? How does labour facilitate ways of ecological knowing and being?

• What are the epistemics of consumption, literary and embodied? How do imagined worlds of consumption intersect with physical spaces and places? Where are the limits of knowing consuming ecologies?

   

Speakers:

• Wendy Davies (Department of History, Emeritus, University College London)

• Caroline Goodson (Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor, American Academy in Rome)

• Bryna Cameron-Steinke (Department of History, Queen's University)

• Denis Genequand (Site et Musée Romains D'Avanches)

• Cam Grey (Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania)

• Emily Kneebone (Department of Classics and Archeology, University of Nottingham)

• Christina Papageorgopoulou (Department of History and Ethnology Democritus University of Thrace)

• Rebecca Redfern (Centre for Human Bioarchaeology, Museum of London)

Sponsors

• Center for Collaborative History
• Department of Classics
• Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity
• Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies
• Program in Medieval Studies