Climate in the Roman World

Speaker: Brandon McDonald, Department of Classical Studies, Tufts University
Interpretations of the nature and influence of climate in the Roman world are frequently guided by deterministic rational. Many scholars believe that the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO) - a period during which several areas of the Mediterranean region experienced warmer and more stable weather conditions - was central to the expansion of the Roman Empire. Similarly, some think climatic trends and events in the centuries subsequent to the RCO, especially the so-called Late Antique Little Ice Age beginning in the mid-sixth century CE, were in large part responsible for the Empire’s decline and disintegration. However, the Mediterranean is made up of a multitude of disparate climatic systems and natural landscapes. Roman-era societies living amongst these ecosystems are just as diverse - each with their own environmental coping mechanisms of varying success. This lecture seeks to nuance these differences in climate and society to highlight why broad climatic phases cannot by themselves be used as societal determinants.
Check out Brandon's interview with TuftsNow on Looking at Ancient Roman Plagues through an Environmental Lens.
Brandon McDonald is the Rumsey Family Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Department of Classical Studies with a secondary appointment in Environmental Studies at Tufts University. His research centers on human-environment interaction in the ancient Mediterranean region, with particular focus on the influence of climatic/environmental change and infectious disease on Roman civilizations. Brandon co-directs a Late Antique excavation project in the Küçükçekmece Lagoon (Istanbul), and he has also conducted fieldwork in southwestern Turkey, Italy, Egypt, and Greenland, the latter as part of an ice core palaeoclimatology team. His teaching includes topics ranging from environmental history and historical epidemiology to ancient urbanism and the archaeology of the Roman economy. Brandon came to Tufts after three years of postdoctoral work at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He studied Ancient History and Classics at Columbia University (2015), and he received an MPhil (2017) and a DPhil (2021) in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford.