Nestor’s Two Forests: Sustainable Practices and Resource Procurement in the Pylian Kingdom (20 min)

Presenters

Rebekah McKay, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Michon, Nasi, and Balent have observed that there is a reflex in state policy, both now and in the past, to lock into one of two conflicting views of forest management: the moral forest, an unblemished landscape, protected from the appetites of humankind; and the crop forest, an asset that serves and supplies human enterprises. This paper explores the values and beliefs that inform these orientations toward sustainable practices or, conversely, maximization and the discounting of future returns and the ways in which they accordingly inform public opinion, policy, and practice. By analyzing palynological data from western Messenia during the Middle and Late Bronze Age, which speak to supply and ecological outcomes, and calculating resource demand using archaeological and documentary evidence, it is possible to deduce which orientation toward forest resources asserted itself and if there were efforts made toward cooperative sustainability. In this way we can align the environmental outcomes with schematic pathways of thoughts and decisions and chart those otherwise intangible provinces of choice in the landscape. The annihilation of the local pine stock in the Late Bronze Age, expansion of open fields and olive orchards, and the conservation of oak woodlands are the consequences of centuries of choices, mediated by power arrangements, that testify to a bifurcated forest vision with distinct systems of practice. Pine and oak were perceived differently with respect to scarcity and abundance; they had different return horizons, where pine supply met immediate need, while the overexploitation of oak wood was exclusively curtailed. Finally, those who held these beliefs also had regulatory control, such that prescribed use-practices directly reflected these values. This resulted in the circumscription of certain tree populations, where felling and grazing were controlled, combined with the unabated degradation of others.