Legacies of historical human activities in Medieval forest dynamics of the Italian peninsula
When historians and paleoecologists work directly together to study the past (what is called a consilience-driven approach) we are able to develop much more nuanced explanations for the role of people (or climate) as a cause of past abrupt environmental change. The joint histories of socioeconomic change, developed from archival sources, and ecologic change, reconstructed from pollen analysis of lake sediments, has helped clarify the interrelationship between societal factors and climate forcing in shaping land-use legacies along the Italian Peninsula. We found that different communities, guided by different political and economic structures, created entirely different landscapes, even during periods of similar climate, but after the black plague the rewilding landscape is a common trait in the Apennines