Quantifying Surplus and Sustainability in the Archaeological Record at the Carthaginian-Roman Urban Mound of Zita, Tripolitania

• Kaufman, Brett ^[7] ; Barnard, Hans ^[1] ; Drine, Ali ; Khedher, Rayed ^[2] ; Farahani, Alan ^[8] ; Tahar, Sami Ben ^[9] ; Jerray, Elyssa ^[3] ; Damiata, Brian N. ^[1] ; Daniels, Megan ^[4] ; Cerezo-Román, Jessica ; Fenn, Thomas ^[5] ; Moses, Victoria ^[6]
  1. [1] University of California System

     University of California System

     Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] Wake Forest University

     Wake Forest University

     Township of Winston, Estados Unidos

     
  3. [3] Aix-Marseille University

     Aix-Marseille University

     Arrondissement de Marseille, Francia

     
  4. [4] University of British Columbia

     University of British Columbia

     Canadá

     
  5. [5] University of Oklahoma

     University of Oklahoma

     Estados Unidos

     
  6. [6] University of Arizona

     University of Arizona

     Estados Unidos

     
  7. [7] University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  8. [8] Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada
  9. [9] Institut National du Patrimoine Tunisia

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• Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 4, 2021, págs. 484-497
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Cultural ecological theory is applied to a spatially and temporally bounded archaeological data set to document long-term paleoecological processes and associated sociopolitical behaviors. Volumetric excavations, treating the material culture of an archaeological matrix similar to an ecological core, can yield quantifiable frequencies of surplus goods that provide a multiproxy empirical lens into incremental changes in land use practices, natural resource consumption, and, in this case, likely overexploitation. Archaeological methods are employed to quantify cultural ecological processes of natural resource exploitation, industrial intensification, sustainability and scarcity, and settlement collapse during the colonial transition between Carthaginian and Roman North Africa. The data indicate that overexploitation of olive timber for metallurgical fuel taxed the ecological metabolism of the Zita resource base, likely contributing to a collapse of the entire local economic system