Two Article Thursday: Fracking and the Climate in Late Antiquity

I spent some time between classes reading a couple articles that felt relevant to my current research (and interests). It seemed reasonable to combine them into a Two Article Thursday.

Article the First

I read with great interest Gabe Eckhouse’s and Ewan Gibbs’s, “Two Late Imperial Oil Booms: A comparison of the constrained national energy imaginaries of the UK’s North Sea and US hydraulic fracturing” in Geoforum (2025). It outlined the relationship between imperialism and oil in the late 20th and early 21st century. Framed as a response to the post-colonial (and decolonial) nature of OPEC in the 1970s, both the UK and the US looked to domestic oil production as a way to assert their long-standing national aspirations of influence on a global scale. In the UK this involved hugely expensive oil plays in the North Sea; in the US, this involved the use of fracking to unlock formerly “tight” oil reserves.

The role that fracking played in my research in the Bakken caught my attention. One of the supporting arguments advanced by the authors is the fracking in shale oil fields such as the Bakken, as compared the North Sea oil (which is a more conventional oil field), produces wells that are often short lived meaning that drilling has to occur constantly to produce profitability. As a result, companies that seek to profit from fracking require a constant flow of capital to fund new wells. This often results in these companies constantly renegotiating debt. When oil prices drop, the short term productivity of fracked wells mean that companies often pause drilling of new wells and this intermittent activity requires the rapid movement of capital and labor into and out of these tight oil plays. The Bakken boom then is not merely another oil boom, but a distinctive kind of boom promoted by the distinctive character of both the geology and the financial mechanisms required to extract oil from these oil fields.

It is interesting that the authors did not develop a bit more the hypermasculine nationalism that emerged among workers (and companies) involved in fracking booms. If Late Imperialism is manifest in the peddling of influence backed by financial and energy resources, I would also contend that it “late nationalism” binds the workers in certain sectors more closely to nationalist rhetoric. These workers are not only laboring in a volatile, dangerous, and sometimes highly remunerative industry, but also advancing nationalist goals. As such, corporate owned work force housing sites are festooned with nationalist and patriotic images and workers wear company gear with the American flag patches evocative of the military. Moreover, many of the same companies involved in the Bakken, for example, also were involved in US military activities abroad from Halliburton (and their subsidiary KBR) who built military bases and provided advanced logistics to companies that specialized in workforce and military housing. In other words, the entanglement of the oil industry in national operations goes well beyond the influence made possible through domestic energy production and extends to the very fabric (literally) of the emergent industries.

Article the Second

I was pretty interested to read Haggai Olshanetsky and Lev Cosijns 2024 article in Klio titled “Challenging the Significance of the LALIA and the Justinianic Plague: A Reanalysis of the Archaeological Record.” It argues that our shifting ceramic chronologies have the impact of decoupling settlement contractions and economic decline from the mid-sixth-century catastrophes associated with the Justinianic plague and Late Antique Little Ice Age.

The start by arguing that the dating for the end of many sites in the Negev desert is a half century too early causing archaeologists to associate their demise to demographic shifts caused by the Justinianic plague. They contend that the LALIA would have likely made marginal lands such as the Negev more productive than during the hotter and drier conditions of the region during their climate optimum. In other words, the settlement pattern in this region seem to neither confirm chronologically to the Justinianic plague (at least during its initial outbreak) nor the productive potential of these areas during the LALIA. Indeed, ceramic evidence from middens (especially LR4 and LR5 amphora sherds) and recalibrated C14 dates tend to reinforce the continued prosperity of these regions into the 7th century when the Persian and then Islamic invasions disrupted the region’s settlement and economy.

With this established, the authors expand the scope of their analysis and demonstrate how surveys elsewhere in Israel, in Greece, and in Cyprus demonstrate similar trends. Shipwreck data, at least from the Eastern Mediterranean appears to confirm the on going prosperity and connectivity of the region in the early or even mid-7th century.  For the authors, this data provides a powerful and expansive counterpoint to the growing chorus of work looking to associate the weakening of the Roman world to mid-6th century plague and climate change.

While this kind of research is ongoing and involves critically reexamining older projects and the assumptions upon which their chronologies and arguments rest. It also involves testing existing and developing hypotheses with new excavations and survey. For example, understanding how the plague may have impacted material conditions among those who survived is a classic question among scholars of the Medieval bubonic plague and vital to attempting to connect archaeological evidence to social conditions.

I like to imagine that our work at Polis on Cyprus strives to move the needle in this debate, by pushing ever later the prosperity and connectivity of this community in the 7th and even early 8th century.