Roman Empire

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• Estimates put the average Roman male’s consumption at a litre or more of diluted wine per day.
• The drink was also a symbol of civilised behaviour, and widely used as a drug, medicine and ritual beverage.

We can learn a great deal from the methods Romans used to produce wine about adapting our own agricultural systems to a warming planet. My research has explored the role of vine agroforestry systems in Roman viticulture by looking at archaeology, ancient literature and more modern sources.

Forest agriculture

• In contrast to the low plants that blanket hillsides in modern vineyards, these vines grew high into the trees.
• Numerous scenes on Roman sarcophagi and mosaics depict harvesters picking grapes using high ladders, and collecting them in small, distinctive cone-shaped baskets.

Pre industrial wine production

• They would combine several crops on one small area of land in order to survive, though more commercial farms have also been recorded.
• Both Pliny and Columella recommended the use of fast growing trees with lots of foliage to protect vines from snooping animals.
• This observation may baffle modern wine growers, as grapevines do not like too much water.

To modern wine makers, growing vines in damp soil and humid air is unthinkable. It presents a huge risk of fungal diseases that could weaken and kill the vine. Nevertheless, the Romans made it work.

An enduring, ancient technique

• This relatively recent documentation, in combination with ancient source material, reveals the ingenuity of the system.
• This means that they soak up excess water from the soil, acting as a water pump and contributing to the natural drainage of an area.
• High climbing vines also have deeper and more developed roots, which makes them more resistant to rot caused by parasites.

An example for a warming world

• This means that Roman winemakers in Italy often operated under warmer and more humid conditions than those experienced in much of the 20th century.
• Most importantly, however, the shade provided by trees seems to delay the ripening of grapes by weeks without problematically decreasing yields.

Roman agriculture on the world stage

• The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has recently stressed the benefits of agroforestry in a warming world.
• Insights into Roman and pre-industrial practices suggest that this approach may also help winemakers to adapt to an ever-warming planet.

Dimitri Van Limbergen no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

• On Sept. 30, 2023, Pope Francis swore in 21 clergymen as new members of the College of Cardinals.
• Francis has ensured that the College includes clergy from around the world and is representative of the diversity within Catholicism.
• As a specialist in medieval Christianity, I have studied the complex history of the College of Cardinals.

Early church leadership

• These meetings were often held in private homes called house churches – domestic buildings that were later adapted solely for worship by members of the local Christian community.
• It was during this time that leadership of these communities developed into three main orders of ordained clergy: Overseers became bishop, elders became priests, and ministers became deacons.
• After the legalization of Christianity in the early fourth century, Christians were free to build large, more elaborate public buildings for worship, which often expanded some of these original house churches.

Papacy as a political prize

• However, because of ongoing warfare, conquest and political turmoil, Christianity in western Europe entered a more turbulent period.
• Popes came to exert political as well as spiritual power, leaving the office of the papacy vulnerable to the influence of competing secular powers, as well as powerful local Roman families and foreign rulers.
• In the later ninth and 10th centuries, however, the papacy again became a political prize for prominent Roman families and Italian nobility.

Vatican II and other developments

• Several popes made more substantial changes in the number and selection of cardinals in the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Later, on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, held from from 1962 to 1965, Pope John XXIII declared that all cardinals must be ordained bishops.
• Subsequently, John Paul II – pope from 1978 until his death in 2005 – dispensed certain exceptional priests, often elderly theologians, from this requirement.

A larger College of Cardinals

• Partly because of this stress on diversity, the size of the College of Cardinals increased dramatically.
• That limit remained in effect until the 20th century, when John XXIII expanded the College to 88 cardinals, which his successor, Pope Paul VI, expanded to 134 – less than half the size of the College today.

Cardinals and the future of the church

• During his pontificate, Francis’ selections have continued to shape the composition of the College of Cardinals in several ways.
• Some more conservative Catholic bishops and cardinals have criticized the pope’s statements and actions as increasingly divergent from Catholic traditional teaching.
• Whatever the outcome of the next papal election, members of the College of Cardinals, as bishops in active ministry, diplomats, intellectuals and papal advisers, will have a profound role in shaping that future.

• Even so, they seem to have the same objective: the gold and silver of the Spanish Empire.
• A surprise attack by the English wiped out the fleet, which was about to reach its destination.
• The company Odyssey was sweeping the bottom of the sea in search of the wreck, even though this was a potentially delicate archaeological site.
• In the end, they were forced to return everything and pay a large part of the court costs.

Archaeology provides context

• Archaeological treasure hunters pose a problem not only for underwater archaeological heritage but also for heritage pieces and sites located on land.
• Because of all this, the context in which archaeological remains appear is absolutely key.

The price of underwater conservation

• The other big difference is that studying an underwater site is prohibitively expensive.
• To begin with, highly specialised labour is needed, along with diving licences, underwater equipment, one or more boats, and very expensive excavation equipment that can vacuum up mud or sand from the seabed.
• In land archaeology, shifts of 8 hours or more in length are normal – something unthinkable in underwater archaeology.
• And making a profit by doing a good job of underwater archaeology is impossible because of the high costs associated with it.

That ship belongs to us

• In theory, everything that falls into the jurisdictional waters of a given country or the nearby continental shelf belongs to that country, unless there is an international treaty involved.
• In other words, if an American ship had sunk more than a hundred years ago in Spanish territorial waters, the remains would still belong to the United States – and vice versa.