On 28 April, the American Academy in Rome will host an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine how riverscapes changed in the centuries of the Roman empire and afterwards and what those changes meant for human societies and their economies. The conference, River Ecologies and Exchange, draws on geology, archaeology, and history to reconstruct major river systems and trace their evolving relationships with the communities that lived alongside them.

Participants will present new research on a range of interconnected themes: the resettling of river valleys following demographic and political upheaval; the silting of ports and the decline of riverine infrastructure; the long-term consequences of Roman land clearances on fluvial environments; and the transition from monetized to non-monetary exchange systems in the post-Roman world. Four major river systems will serve as the focus of comparative analysis—the Tiber, the Po, the Ebro, and the Nile—examined across the longue durée from approximately 100 to 1500 CE.

The meeting brings together the disciplines of geology, archaeology, and history to interrogate large scale changes over long time periods. By combining the evidence of sediment cores and field survey with documentary sources and numismatic data, the conference aims to produce a richer, more integrated picture of how rivers shaped and were reshaped by human activity in the premodern world, and in turn the role of rivers in inland commerce as Mediterranean commerce waxed and waned.

Participants

Lisa Briggs (Barca Archaeology, London)
Gift of the river: Fluvial deposits and their implication for biomolecular analysis of Roman shipwrecks and harbours proximal to river systems

Peter Campbell (Heritage Crime Investigations, Cranfield University)
Riverine Processes and Cultural Patterns: Ancient rivers, Object-Oriented Ecology, and the question of environmental determinism

María Josefa Castillo Pascual (University of La Rioja)
The Economic Conquest of the River Ebro from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

Giuliano Giovannetti (University of Roma Tre)
The river harbours of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages

Jean-Philippe Goiran (CNRS / Archéorient, University of Lyon)
Where rivers meet the sea: multimodal harbour systems in the ancient Mediterranean, a geoarchaeological perspective

Alice Lucchini (University of Zadar)
Archaeological Evidence for Navigation in the Early Medieval Po Valley: the Po and the Oglio Rivers

Simon Malmberg (University of Bergen)
The Tiber in Flux: a long perspective on river ports in ancient Rome

Rory Naismith (University of Cambridge)
Rethinking River Valleys and Exchange Systems in the Early Middle Ages

Marco Panato (University of Nottingham)
From the charters to the land (and vice versa): Pisa, its rivers and territory in the early Middle Ages

Penelope Wilson (Durham University)
The Nile in Roman Egypt: A Risk Assessment