This is the fourth in a series of five lectures on Material Environments, hosted jointly by the American Academy in Rome and the British School at Rome over the academic year 2025-2026. Through five evening lectures, speakers will present new research on environments of ancient and post-Classical Rome and Italy. Changing technologies of research provide new answers to questions about the experience and effect of landscape and climate. These lectures showcase the ways in which environmental considerations recast our study of the past.

This paper reassesses climate variability in Central Italy during the second and third centuries CE—a pivotal period between the Roman Climate Optimum and the onset of Late Antique environmental instability. Drawing upon palaeoclimatic data, tree-ring and speleothem analyses, lake sediment studies, and archaeological survey evidence, it argues that Central Italy experienced a mosaic of environmental conditions and locally differentiated responses rather than a uniform climatic crisis. Through case studies from the Sabina Tiberina, the Reate Basin, and southern Etruria, the paper highlights how rural societies adapted to moderate climatic oscillations through infrastructural investment, diversification, and continuity of land use. It concludes that socio-political transformations, rather than abrupt climatic deterioration, drove the restructuring of the rural landscape in the third century CE.

Sabine Huebner is Professor, Department of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Basel.