Publication Date
12-12-2014
Degree Level
B.A.
Program
History
First Advisor
Root, Bradley
Second Advisor
Cardenas, Richard
Document Type
Thesis
Medium
manuscript
LCSH subject
Rome—History—Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D; Rome—Environmental conditions; Climatic changes—History; Agriculture and state—Rome
Abstract
Although historians have debated the various causes of the fall of the Roman Empire for centuries, scholars did not consider the impact of environmental change until the early twentieth century. Initially, environmental historians believed that agricultural decline resultant from soil erosion and deforestation played a dominant role; however, scientific and historical evidence can now be utilized to demonstrate that these two factors were much less prevalent during the third through fifth centuries than they had been during the prosperous Pax Romana. In contrast, recent climatological studies, most notably dendrochronological sequences, have established that a combination of cooling and desertification plagued Eurasia during the late Roman Empire. Moreover, the examination of a wide variety of literary sources, historical writings, and archaeological findings related to flooding of the Tiber and Nile Rivers substantiates the climate change theory. Thus, a steady decrease in temperature and precipitation during the third and fourth centuries triggered a severe drought that devastated Roman agriculture and contributed significantly to the collapse of the Roman Empire by inciting demographic decline, economic retrogression, and political upheaval, as well as by prompting the westward migrations of the Germanic and Hunnic peoples into Roman territory.
Recommended Citation
Finnie, M. T. (2014). The Underlying Current: Climate Change and the Fall of Rome (Honors Thesis). St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas. Retrieved from https://commons.stmarytx.edu/honorstheses/62/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Other History Commons