Dissertation Defense: Bryna Cameron-Steinke
Candidate: Bryna Cameron-Steinke
Major: History
Advisor: Timothy Newfield, Ph.D.
Title: Bounded by the Sea: An Interdisciplinary Environmental History of Early Medieval Brittany
In some ways, the sixth to tenth centuries were turbulent for Brittany. The northwesternmost peninsula of France saw population shifts, political changes, and military conquests, including by the Bretons, Franks, and Vikings. Yet, throughout the early Middle Ages, Brittany’s inhabitants relied on resources drawn from their natural environment, such as grain, wood, pasture, fish and salt, to maintain stability and build wealth. An interdisciplinary approach, combining written sources with evidence from archaeology and paleoecology, helps to bring this environmental history into clearer focus. Breton written accounts, largely hagiographies, texts relating to the saints, and charters, records of the possessions and legal rights of ecclesiastical institutions, make frequent references to the natural world. Meanwhile, preserved plant matter — pollen, seeds and wood — found in archaeobotanical assemblages, provide an independent natural archive of Breton land management and vegetation change. When layered together, these datasets allow for a more complete and continuous view of land use in early Middle Ages than we are used to.
This dissertation reveals that early medieval Bretons utilized a range of intertwined land use practices, designed to make simultaneous use of waters, woodlands, farmlands, meadows, and pastures. Bretons selected their techniques in accordance with local environmental conditions, for instance sowing tolerant grains on acidic soils or pasturing livestock on otherwise unproductive wetlands. The intensity of Breton land use practices varied throughout the first millennium, as, following a notable phase of rewilding in Late Antiquity (c. 200-500), renewed and unprecedented human impact on the natural landscape increased between c. 500-1000 AD and particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries. These patterns are linked to changes in the region’s social and political make-up, as first the Breton migrations brought new settlers into the region and galvanized an explosion in new monastic foundations, and later Carolingian influence led to an encroachment on Brittany’s natural resources. Viking incursions in the region, meanwhile, did not undo these trends towards agricultural intensification, suggesting that Brittany’s local communities, and the lands they farmed, remained more resilient than their elite landlords. By following visible traces on the page and the landscape, this dissertation recovers this complex history.