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Review of the recurring dark ages: Ecological stress, climate changes, and system transformation

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Environment and History 13 (2007): 503–12. doi: 10.3197/096734007X243186
© 2007 The White Horse Press
Book Reviews
The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes and System
Transformation
Sing C. Chew
Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006
ISBN 0-7591-0451-4 (HB) $80.00; 0-7591-0452-2 (PB) $34.95. 292 pp.
In this book, which is a follow up of the authorʼs World Ecological Degrada-
tion, Sing Chew sets out to add an ecological dimension to previous studies of
world systems and more specically to study the role of ecology in explaining
Dark Ages – periods of social, economic and demographic decline. The thesis is
that ʻDark Ages occur as a consequence of ecological exhaustion and stress and
exhibit losses in wealth, trade disruptions, and simplication of lifestyles and
less hierarchization and more egalitarianism of the social structureʼ (p. 160). This
argument, of a connection, or even a causative relation between over-utilisation
of natural resources and social crisis is not new. New is perhaps the attempt to
analyse Dark Ages through time, from the Bronze Age to the fall of the Roman
Empire, and to put this in the context of the present global situation. Given the
vast and fast growing body of literature on environmental history, based on
scientic methods in archaeology, palaeoecology and palaeoclimatology, there
is scope today for such a work aimed at a broad synthesis.
Chewʼs material for the analysis of the ecological component in world sys-
tems history is a rather small selection of secondary literature, together with data
from 40 pollen diagrams. These cover an area from Greenland in the northwest
to Turkey in the southeast and a number of European countries in between. It
is an innovative approach to make use of such a data set in order to illuminate
the relations between economic/social expansion and regression, and the use of
natural resources. Pollen diagrams do give a comparatively standardised picture
of changes in the composition of vegetation. Moreover, for the periods and for
most of the areas that Chew focuses on, human inuence plays a central role in
these changes. That type of data therefore represents an interesting contrast to
what can be gathered from scant historical and archaeological sources for the
same periods. Berglundʼs synthesis ʻVegetation and human inuence in South
Scandinavia during prehistoric timeʼ (Oikos 1969) showed the potential of this
approach, and it has inuenced research in the broad eld of environmental
history in Northern Europe and beyond. Periods of increased human inuence
on the vegetation, as indicated by a relative increase of pollen from herbs and
grasses in relation to pollen from trees were shown to coincide with periods
known from the archaeological record for settlement expansion and the occur-
rence of nds indicating wealth. Such syntheses always have to struggle with
problems of chronology, but also with scale generalising from a local or regional
vegetation development to a broader pattern. New methods for dating, absolute
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pollen count instead of relative, lots of new pollen data and the increased use of
computerised databases have increased the possibilities for such syntheses, but
have also complicated the picture and made generalisations more difcult.
Chew puts much emphasis on this material. Some 60 pages out of a total of
292 are devoted to diagrams showing pollen data, which are used as the main
indicator of environmental change. In this review I will therefore focus on his
treatment of the pollen counts. Scrutinising his treatment of the pollen data is,
however, an arduous task. Chew gives us a total of 17 references for the 40
sites, without indicating which publication refers to which site. It thus requires
a fair amount of detective work to move from Chewʼs very simplied diagrams
and conclusions back to the original sources. Moreover, he does not argue for
the selection of these diagrams, which to my knowledge must represent only
a minority of potentially useful pollen sites for the area and period covered.
The data is apparently based on what is made available at the NOAAʼs pollen
database (Chew, pers. comm.) but that is not made clear in the book.
More problematic than that, however, is that Chew does not seem to be fa-
miliar with the methodological background of pollen analysis. Neither does he
account for the methods by which the original pollen data were retrieved from
the literature and transformed to trend analyses in his diagrams. This is a way of
representing vegetational development over thousands of years as if they were
half year trends of the stock market, a representation which hides more than it
claries (how can numbers of pollen have a negative value?) Computational
treatment of pollen data is well advanced within palaeoecological analysis and
it would have been possible to consult this literature to nd more relevant ways
of comparing data rather than to invent this very crude measure.
In order not to be too technical about pollen analysis in this review, I will
restrict my comments about Chewʼs many mistakes to one point. Plantago
lanceolata (ribwort plantain) is in most ecological contexts considered to be
clear indicator of human grassland management. However, the Plantago genus
also encompasses a lot of other plants with other ecologies. Chew takes all data
on Plantago species to be a measure of deforestation in all ecological contexts.
Thus the occurrence of a few pollen grains of Plantago maritima (sea plantain)
is taken as an indicator of human-inuenced deforestation in Greenland during
the rst millennium B.C. If he had read the article he refers to, he would have
been convinced that the driving force behind vegetation changes in Greenland
in this period was climate rather than human inuence.
Chewʼs rst use of the pollen data is to establish periods of Dark Ages based
on the pollen record and he contrasts this with the established view of historians
and archaeologists. He writes: ʻdespite the fact that historians and archaeologists
specializing in the Ancient World did not identify a Dark Age period in the fourth
millennium B.C., it seems that twenty-nine of the pollen proles indicate that
there was a phase of deforestation during the fourth millennium B.C (p. 48). In
this sentence Chew seems to assume that periods of deforestation coincide with
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periods of Dark Ages. This is more directly expressed on page 55: ʻThe shift
from predominantly forests to grasslands in terms of proportion occurred during
periods of Dark Agesʼ. This is indeed an interesting statement, given that the
established view, in most previous syntheses of human inuence on vegetation,
has been that increased human inuence and deforestation is coupled with peri-
ods of economic and demographic expansion, while periods of socio-economic
decline are generally recorded in the vegetation history as a succession of for-
est regrowth on formerly open lands. Chew here demonstrates a lack of basic
understanding of vegetational dynamics and their connection to societal causes.
This makes further reading of the book problematic. A major problem seems to
be that he gives more weight to his own simplied, quantitative treatment of the
pollen diagrams than to the attempts at syntheses that scholars familiar with the
strengths and weaknesses of pollen analyses have in fact presented.
Based on his own crude trend analysis of some aspects of the pollen diagrams,
he establishes a ʻPeriodization of Dark Agesʼ (p. 54), which is presented as an
independent and complementary approach to the periodisation of Dark Ages as
presented by historians and archaeologists. It is difcult to evaluate this table,
given Chewʼs twisted argument on deforestation as indicative of Dark Ages.
The two last phases of Dark Ages, according to this table, are A.D. 296 to A.D.
1171 and A.D. 1311 to A.D. 1733 respectively. Although the dates are given at
the accuracy level of individual years, the calculation behind is not transparent.
Are we assumed to interpret the period from 296 to 1171 as a period of open
landscapes, with a strong human inuence, and if so how does this interpretation
compare with the established view of decreased human inuence after the fall
of the Roman Empire, at least in the outer peripheries? Similarly, how do we
compare his delimitation of the long period from 1311 to 1733 with the histori-
cal record, when prices and other historical data indicate both a late medieval
decline and an early modern recovery? With the weight Chew gives to his own
treatment of the pollen record he confuses more than he claries concerning our
historical and ecological understanding of the relations between societal and
ecological crisis periods. A good rule for using data from other disciplines in a
synthesis is to try to follow at least what was at the research frontier some 20
years ago. Chew is not yet familiar with achievements from the early twentieth
century in the eld of pollen analysis.
A basic tenet behind Chewʼs misreading of the palynological record seems to
lie in his assumption that all human inuence on the natural system is exploitative
and ultimately leads to environmental degradation. This is a line of thought that is
established in Chewʼs previous work. Recent research on degradation narratives
has taught us to be wary of such conclusions. Societies, especially the kind of
exploitative empires that are in focus in Chewʼs ʻworld ecological degradationʼ,
certainly change and inuence the natural environment. It is, however, an open
empirical question to investigate in which areas, social contexts and environments
these changes lead to investments in land that lay the basis for coming sustainable
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food production, and where, on the other hand, such inuence is directly related
to land degradation and erosion of a kind that reduces the productive capacity
of the land for a longer period. Chewʼs schematic understanding of such rela-
tions is further underlined by the usage of the concepts of Nature and Culture
(with capitalisation) as xed entities, a gross simplication of the complex and
dialectic relations between human use and changes in ecosystems. Researchers
from both the natural sciences and social sciences have for decades now been
working towards a rethinking of these problematic concepts. While ecologists
are increasingly looking at integrated social-ecological systems, social theorists
are deconstructing the modernist assumptions of a separation of nature from
culture. Chew does not seem to be aware of this.
The book is badly edited. The list of references contains several bad mistakes,
for example there is a reference to a non-existent journal supposed to be named
Geologis Frem; Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moodyʼs book The Making of
the Cretan Landscape is listed twice, under both Rackham and Rockham. The
book also contains several horrors of language and thinking, such as the fol-
lowing sentence: ʻThis further suggests that the vulnerability of the landscape
during certain periods, and in different geographical locations, could continue
to sustain socio-economic reproduction, though perhaps at a lowered level than
before the onset of the Dark Agesʼ (p. 147).
As Chew writes in the introductory chapter, there is indeed a great demand
for bold syntheses on the relations between (social) world systems and ecological
change. Perhaps a sociologist inspired by Ander Gunder Frank would be the right
person to do this, rather than someone too narrowly entrenched in either history
or palaeoecology? Such syntheses will inevitably have to navigate between the
Scylla of the detailed historical and ecological evidence and the Charybdis of
bold and simplifying models. With his strange and amateurish handling of the
ecological evidence on the one hand, and his scant reading of the many new
and different attempts at understanding the interrelations between societies and
ecology on the other, Chew does not have the basic capacity to accomplish this
difcult navigation.
MATS WIDGREN
Department of Human Geography
Stockholm University
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