The essential question that will drive the unit, and that students will answer in their final project, is “how did geological forces affect patterns of life, settlement, and society across the Roman Empire?” The second essential question is the first’s inverse: how did the Romans shape and adapt the natural world to their will? These questions illuminate the central themes of the unit: the natural history of planet Earth is essential to our understanding of its recorded human history; skilled historians must be able to access knowledge and skills from across disciplines. By understanding historical and geological concepts in tandem, we can meet the diverse and complex challenges of both our present and future.
The historiographical impulse of this unit was taken from historians of the American West. In these histories, the physical landscape is essential to the study historical patterns of settlement and expansion. In his monograph on the Colorado Coalfield War of the 1910s, historian Thomas G. Andrews begins his exploration of one of deadliest labor conflicts in American history with the formation of the coal deposits, writing that the discovery of coal in Colorado was “possible only because of events that had taken place at the time the Rocky Mountains were first formed, long before human life evolved.5” The geological processes that brought coal to Colorado shapes the human story that follows long after it. While the section on Earth history here is brief, only four pages, its very inclusion stresses the importance of the links between natural and human histories. The story of the colonization and exploitation of the American West is bound to humans encountering a specific set of natural features, in a unique coincidence and convergence between the forces of plate tectonics and human evolution, The mineral and material riches of the West brought hundreds of thousands of settlers, from gold in California, oil in Texas, and fertile lands and logging in the Pacific Northwest. We can see similar patterns in Roman history, as the expansion of the Republic and then Empire brought legions across the span of Europe and into Asia. People ascribe profound meanings as vast as they are varied to our planet, from seeing beauty in a waterfall to ascribing divinity to mountains, volcanos, and caves. The resources humans have harnessed, and will continue to harness, from the planet were all millions of years in the making, until people ascribed meaning to it, whether it was economic or metaphysical. One of the pillars of geography is unfolding how humans adapt to, and change, the environment, but often left out of these stories is how that environment came to be in the first place.
Due to the nature of our education system, where students take classes dedicated to a single subject, they are subconsciously taught to believe that learning and knowledge can fit into neat and tidy categories: mathematics, history, science, English, foreign languages. Students have largely become accustomed to this, rarely expecting to see science in the history course. Among the issues of this compartmentalization of learning is the troublesome notion that one is more inclined to STEM fields or to the Humanities, potentially scaring students away from deeply learning and engaging with a topic, because they are “just not a math person.” This mindset hinders students from thinking about a problem with multiple perspectives. At higher degrees of academia, a specialized set of skills makes sense; one cannot expect every expert in a subject to also be an expert in three other fields. Our students are not yet at the point where need to specialize, nor should they. Applying a cross-disciplinary approach to learning enables students to think critically and creatively about a topic, strengthening the learning they are doing in their other classes. Research demonstrates that cross-curricular pedagogy enhances student learning. Education scholar Jonathan Savage writes that a cross curricular approach “is characterised by sensitivity towards, and a synthesis of, knowledge, skills and understandings from various subject areas. These inform an enriched pedagogy that promotes an approach to learning which embraces and explores this wider sensitivity through various methods.”6 In the 21st century world of ideas, strong problem solvers must see that multiple methods can be used to resolve issues that are becoming increasingly varied and complex. Academia is responding to this need as well. Historian W.V. Harris notes that “the subject matter of history has widened still further in recent decades to include problems that have also been, and continue to be, the objects of widespread scientific attention.”7 To address these problems, historians need to use the skills and methods of scientists, and scientists equally need the skills and methods of historians. Harris goes on to write that “scholars still write books about the ancient environment that are essentially digest of what Greek and Roman writers said about the environment… but if we want to know what the environment in antiquity was actually like, and why it developed as it did, we turn to scientific archaeology, to geology, and so on.”8 Of course, good students of history should rely on primary sources, as for example, Pliny’s writings on Pompeii were crucial for our understanding what came to be known as Plinian eruptions. On the other hand, the best kinds of history do not limit themselves to a constant reinterpretation of the same texts. The way ancient writers might have perceived natural and geological phenomena might differ from our contemporary scientific understandings, and we can still use those to best make sense of the natural world of the past. Geography and geology already have many natural overlaps, and this unit aims to use methods from both of those fields to enhance student understandings of the worlds of our past. In the geologic timescale, where years are counted in the millions, human history is but a small fraction of our planet’s history; however, those forces and processes shape the world as the Romans, and ourselves, encountered it.
In addition to the demonstrably strong effects of a cross-curricular approach on student learning, thinking across disciplines likewise allows students to apply lessons learned from history to modern problems using many approaches. While this unit is not strictly focused on environmental history, geology and environmental sciences have many crucial and important overlaps to the study of both geography and history. At its core, as J. Donald Hughes defines it in The Mediterranean: An Environmental History, “environmental history is the study of the interaction between human societies and the natural environment through time.”9 This allows us to understand how the Earth system is shaped by human actions. Through the study of environmental history, as it will be incorporated into this unit, students will understand the problems that the people of the Ancient World faced: finding and protecting stable sources of potable water, ensuring the transportation of goods and peoples, mining the natural resources that the planet has to offer. As Hughes writes, “the impact of ancient cities on the natural environment, the land and its resources, air and water, and animal and plant populations – produced problems prefiguring many of those familiar in modern settings”10 All these issues are applicable to the challenges that humans face today, magnified by industrialization and globalization. In their simplest forms the challenge is the same: how do we meet their needs for minerals, water, and energy? What changes, of course, is the context and details. By seeing how ancient people answered that question, their successes and failures, both in human costs and environmental, students will have another set of knowledge that can be used to find solutions today.
This unit’s primary thematic aim is in methodology, rather than just content. The unit has been designed for a seventh-grade world cultures and geography course, but the methods used here, that is, using geology and science as tools to understand the past, are intended to be used across a variety of social studies curricula. As the study of Ancient Rome is part of the seventh-grade curriculum in New Haven and given the Roman Empire’s spread throughout much of the European continent, studying Rome naturally takes students across the wide spanning geography of the region. Case studies are the best tools to achieve the thematic purpose, because we can look at several unique phenomena that are present in one place but not in another (or that might be present in all locations.) The next part of this unit focuses specifically on the intertwining of geology and history in Ancient Rome, but teachers should focus on the ways that students will student history and science concurrently in this unit. For example, a similar World History or Geography course could apply this to the great African Empires of Aksum and Mali, or to any of the ruling dynasties of China from the Qin to the Qing. A United States history course might examine the geological features across the nation’s vast territory, considering how both Native peoples and settlers interacted with the land in the colonial period, or how agricultural patterns led to the Dust Bowl, or even a contemporary look at the hydrological issues facing much of the American West. This process does demand a significant amount of preparation and research, and overcoming the mindset that there is a hard divide between the humanities and the sciences. Hopefully this unit might serve as a potential roadmap for employing cross-content skills in our study of history and geography.
