(p. 11) The Greek Mainland is cut almost in half at the Isthmus of Corinth
Hence in antiquity this southern half was known as the Peloponnese or island of the mythical hero Pelops.
(p. 14a) During the Ice Age eras immense forces initiated extensive slopewash and valley alluviation
A considerable amount of these Ice Age piedmont (hill-land rim), plain, and valley fill deposits now lie under the sea, since the growth of global ice sheets was accomplished by drawing sufficient water from the world's oceans to lower sea levels by up to 130 m below present height (see sea-level curve, Figure 1.7).
(p. 14b) The Holocene era from ca. 12,000 years ago till today
The special status given to our Interglacial within the Quaternary era, is largely due to the unprecedented impact of human beings on the planet. In fact geologists largely consider the Holocene to be merely a continuation of the Quaternary era.
(p. 15a) Aegean sea-level rise has continued due to landmass adjustments following the disappearance of European ice-sheets
The global warming caused by human impact since the Industrial Revolution will enhance these local rises in sea level, and reverse the commoner static or declining sea-level trend, but at a global level.
(p. 15b) There is no single "Greek climate"
In a similar way, but on a much larger scale, the "Mediterranean climate," with the same characteristics as in Greece and likewise especially sought out by foreign tourists, only applies to restricted, usually coastal regions, of the lands around that "Great Sea."
(p. 17a) Factors influencing rainfall and dryness in Greece
The rains which flow east from the Westerlies and through the Mediterranean in autumn and spring, increasingly lose their strength the further east they penetrate, making much of Iberia and Italy wetter than Greece, while Greece in turn is wetter than the Levantine coast of Palestine-Lebanon-Syria. Within Greece the latitudinal effects, which on a grander scale bring more rain to more northerly countries in Southern Europe than Greece, also operate to increase dryness in general from North to South in the country, so that parts of the south coast of Crete are more akin to North Africa than to the climate of Northern Greece.
(p. 17b) The latitude of Greece is comparatively low in Europe, enhancing the dryness of its southern regions
The tiny island of Gavdos off the south coast of Crete is in fact the southernmost point in Europe.
(p. 17c) A major underlying element in the varied vegetation of Greece is the effect of altitude as one moves from the coast to the summit of the interior mountains
Of course this picture of the natural vegetation of Greece also has to be nuanced by region: Western lowland Greece is wetter and milder than the East, while the Eastern mountains are drier than those in the West.
(p. 18a) The question of traditional deforestation of parts of Greece by grazing of domestic animals
It is worth noting that the prime cause of deforestation for pastoralism is deliberate burning to maintain open grazing, rather than tree and shrub destruction by the flocks themselves (Rackham 1983). It is increasingly possible to see large swathes of natural vegetation being allowed to reoccupy the Greek landscape, even in the lowlands, as large-scale pastoralism has declined and hill-land agriculture too.
(p. 18b) European Union policies and a national trend to more commercial farming have also led to the abandonment of large areas of upland Greece to scrub and woodland
As throughout Western Europe as a whole.
(p. 18c) The first farmers in Greece used staple cereal crops native to the drier open landscapes of Greece and the Near East
The earliest farmers in Greece arrived from the Eastern Mediterranean with the staples wheat and barley, which were recently domesticated steppe grasses of the Fertile Crescent arid steppe hill-land in their origin lands. Barley and also some of the early farmer root crops also grew wild in the Aegean, and were probably gathered by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations. But domestication did not occur locally, limiting these plants' food value until domestic versions were brought into the region by Neolithic colonizers.
(p. 18d) The origins of transhumant pastoralism in Greece
This is now known to have commenced as early as the Bronze Age, on the basis of archaeological sites found in mountain zones where winter climates rule out permanent habitation for humans or domestic herds.
(p. 20) Prolonged phases of minor climatic change during the Holocene era like the well-known Medieval and post-Medieval climatic fluctuations (early Medieval Warm Era, the subsequent Little Ice Age)
Additional, older phases have been suggested. Bottema (1990) argued that the general shift to a rather moister climate in Greek pollen records for the last 3000 years might be indicative of a prolonged tendency to shift the norm from the mid-interglacial very warm and dry climate to a less severe climate mode.
(p. 21) On the generalized soil map of Greece
In detail, there are countless pockets of excellent soil so small as not to be mapped here, especially the low hill-lands made up of Tertiary soft limestones.
(p. 23a) Pollen analysis shows that considerable expanses of upland Greece remained wooded, with low human populations, till the Early Modern period
In such high mountain zones, with lower climatic aridity and less concentrated seasonal rainfall, woodland has greater natural density, up to the natural treeline limit. Here, apart from natural soil loss, due to steep and rocky terrain, and more severe winters, the combined effects of prolonged open terrain and extreme weather will have had limited impact till relatively recently. In the most recent historic era, particularly the nineteenth-twentieth centuries AD, nonetheless, improved communications and the expansion of timber and mining industries, and a short-lived boom in upland sheep and goat pastoralism linked to commercial marketing, led to unprecedented clearances in such regions.
(p. 23b) Rare phases of landscape instability, apart from Early Holocene examples, lie within periods of dense human occupation, but fail to correlate with every population climax, so abuse of the land by farmers and herds may be inadequate to explain alluviation episodes
Some associations of landscape change between dense human activity and unusual climatic effects have already been put forward (e. g. Zangger 1994). Alongside the multicausal interactions just discussed, the role of tectonic disturbances in altering erosion and deposition must also be allowed for, given that much of Greece is subject to recurrent earthquake and related crustal upheavals (Wilkinson and Pope 2003).
(p. 24a) From around 6000 years ago onward, world sea-level rise globally slowed down or ceased, with subsequently only minor fluctuations in height
We also observed earlier in Chapter 1 that in some parts of the world once covered by, or on the fringes, of the great glacial ice-sheets, land levels have been adjusting to the altered "loading" by becoming, respectively, more elevated relative to the sea, or depressed ("isostatic" effects). Greece is one such region, where an overall trend of slow sea-level rise against global climatic trends (the very recent era of global warming excepted), since 6000 years BP, is taken as due to such isostatic rebound. This is too slight to halt the advance of many larger coastal plains seaward.
(p. 24b) Taken together, the effects of minimal sea-level rise and the increase in erosion of the land caused by humans have favored coastal plains advancing on the sea
At least till the anticipated sea-level rises predicted for the coming decades due to human-induced global warming.
(p. 24c) When Western travelers began to visit Greece in significant numbers, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries AD, their reaction to Greek countryfolk was frequently negative
Only in the better-appointed homes of the small Greek intelligentsia, primarily in the towns, was there knowledge of and aspiration to imitate the glorious ancient Greek nation.
(p. 24d) a Golden Age in Bronze Age Crete, which later scholarship has difficulty extricating itself from
The historiography of the reception of Minoan civilization in Early Modern times continues to inspire scholarship: see also Papadopoulos (2005) and Hamilakis and Momigliano (2006).
(p. 24e) Throughout the twentieth century, observations of traditional lifeways in Greece seemed logically linked to our picture of the remoter past
Walcot's book Greek Peasants, Ancient and Modern (1970) encapsulates this paradigm.
(p. 25) During the late twentieth century, post-colonial thinking (Said 1980), and a growing interest in globalization, led historians and anthropologists to question how untouched and authentic "traditional" societies could be. For Greece, Halstead (1987, 2006), challenged the assumption that lifeways had changed little since the Bronze Age
Paul Halstead is a specialist in the prehistoric economy but also an enthusiastic observer of "traditional" farming and herding practices in the Aegean. Another relevant study is that of Chang (1999).
World History
