That’s actually also partly a myth. The bulk of the deforestation was during the XIX and XXth century due to charcoal production. In the Southeast a lot of Mediterranean woods was lost due to farming practices leading to desertification and touristic development.
It's not so much deforestation as it's the removal of trees best suited for shipbuilding. The trees you want for masts and keels are tall, broad, hardy and therefore old. The incentive to replant an oak tree is not that high if it's your great great grandson who will reap the rewards of your foresight. Not to mention the generations in between might cut down growing oaks for a quick buck or to clear land for other uses. It's a generational problem that easily leads to over-exploitation of old wood. Even England grappled with the problem of finding enough big oaks for the Royal Navy. Fortunately the founding of colonies in North America would solve that problem. So in essence, Spain (and other countries) can have plenty of young forests but lack old trees for specific needs such as ship building.
The deforestation actually happened to England not to Spain but UK has a gift for projecting their own miscues into others to hide their own sheet. Phillip II as an Habsburg ruled the lowlands from Dunkirk to Groningen, Luxembourg and Belgium, Burgundy, as well as the kingdom of Naples and Sicily. So not even all of his fleet was built in Spain. Cuba and Veracruz Mexico already had their own gigs also.
Speaking for southern Italy, it was my understanding that the Romans did in fact cut down vast amounts of trees suitable for the construction of ships. Even though this does not include wood being used primarily as fuel, the landscape and hills to this day do not support ecologically complex flora. Is this not correct?
You are totally right, even more so visit old Roman ports along a lot of north African coast and most are now more than a mile inland, caused by topsoil blowing into the sea and silting those ports up. Cutting down trees in the area meant it created a dust bowl just like that of America in the 1920s. with a similar economic consequences.
Would that still have such an impact today though? It's been more than 1000 years, I'm sure the ecology would have recovered from Roman logging in that much time. Maybe you could argue that a forest being cut down while the empire was still around led to people in the medieval period keeping it clear because in their eyes there wasn't supposed to be a forest there but without that kind of "maintenance" I think the forest would have recovered by now
@@roelant8069 That's not how ecosystems work, once you destroy something sufficiently it never comes back. Look at Scotland, look at Ireland. Boith used to be vast forrests, but never again.
It bothers me that a "wood age" is not prominent in our idea of the development of everything. How much writing not on clay tablets? How many wooden monolithic structures? Wooden planes? Not crazy.
Because history doesn't care about the average peasant. We have such a narrow lens of history that's almost exclusively characterized by the rich, up until the last 300ish years.
@@GoodBaleadaMusic there's never really been a wood age. We use wood just as much today as we ever have. The only things that's changed is how we process the trees.
@Spectre-wd9dl That's an assumption and is incorrect. No we do not use wood at the same total percentage of our resource use. Our most common uses of stone was as a tool for manipulating wood. The human record is missing 90% of its development and it's lost in the wood that does not preserve like clay or stone.
I have actually seen this. I was visiting Fez Morocco and visited a traditional ceramic factory. The fuel used in the kilns was the leftovers from pressing olives. It burns very hot but makes a lot of smoke.
This is fascinating from a ceramics perspective, as the fuel type will have an effect on the quality & characteristics of the brick and/or pottery fired with it. Wood produces a lot of ash, which will contribute to the glaze surface of ware fired with it, including the terra sigillata red slip ware described. In all of the experiments done recreating Roman pottery and brick, I’ve always seen wood used, never once seen either fired with olive pomace. I 100% bet this would change the final products and their firing process.
This reminds me of how the golden age was fueled in the Netherlands, before the age of coal. We used wind power for mechanical processes and we used peet as fuel. E.g. for making salt, pottery, heating homes, etc. The trees we used in our sawmills, were all imported. The grains we milled in our grain mills were also largely imported. The materials came to where the energy was.
Not correct the Romans used coal widely and the Chinese have been using it for nearly six thousand years ago,recently stepping up coal generation for their so called eco friendly evs..
Actually, the golden age started at 1588 and the trade with the Baltic region for grain started after 1645. So only near the end of the golden age we started to import grain. Well it depends on how you define the “golden age” I find a lot of variation in the dates. I suspect the therm is rooted in pop-history
To get an idea of how huge olive plantations at an industrial scale can be, I recommend googling for the Spanish region of Jean. Actually, all of the southern part of the Iberian peninsula is full of olive plantations, at a smaller scale, but they are still producing 90% or more of the olive oil on the planet. See that Italian branded olive oil in the supermarket? It’s Spanish, blended in Italy. Right now, they are planning to use these rest of the olive oil production to generate energy. It can also be used for other applications like plastics
@markVrem I know during 1700’s Sicily was home to hige lemon plantations which supplied lemon juice for the British navy before they switched to limes from Carribean colonies
I remember reading somewhere that the Hellenistic kingdoms depleted the remaining Anatolian forests due to their constant naval warfare. That the Levant lost much of its forests earlier, due to thousands of years of demand from Pharaonic Egypt, which had no trees other than palms but an insatiable demand for timber.
Great video! Really informative. I live in southern Turkey, where we grow our own olive trees, so we dont have to buy olive oil from stores and sell the excess to friends and acqueantinces. The leftovers from the olives, we call Posa or Pirina, are processed and dried. Before natural gas and electric burners, my grandparents would burn that in furnace heaters during winter, use them as fertilizers or as animal feed. Now we sell them to specific merchants that comes along during peak harvesting season and buys them all.
12:20 - 12:26 they didnt neccesarily have to always chop down trees for their fuel, they could always collect the dead wood fallen on the forest floor, these rights were carefully guarded.
Plus apparently the romans (and presumably other cultures) cut the trees not at the ground, but a bit higher up. This allowed the tree to continue living and producing many branches, which could later be conveniently be "harvested" again. This method created "fire wood forests".
@@3gunslingersseems like a very inefficient and tedious way, as you have to dry the wood before using it. Hence cutting it down low is far easier and have less risk of falling
@@GoalOrientedLifting A common European manifestation is called coppicing (in English), and it's quite efficient. It's still done successfully at a commercial scale today. Pollarding, which the Romans did, isn't done today but it was certainly efficient for the scale of most Medieval operations.
Dead wood standing is the best because its dry but not rotten. Their is multiples ways for creating standing dead wood one of the way use by the indigenous of eastern north america and on Europe is girdling (Cut ayway the Bark and the living section all the way around the tree and u Cut the connection between the Roots and the leaves, wich kill the tree) u have a standing dead tree dans can provide fuel wood easily for the best season
The recent article “The Coal Conquest” in Dr. Anton Howes’ “Age of Invention” newsletter/Substack blog also seems pretty relevant, even though it’s about fuel supply and demand in medieval and modern England rather than the Roman Empire. Lots of coppicing and pollarding. Trees were cut down to provide timber for woodworking, but firewood was not generally made by cutting down (entire) trees.
People also forget that, comparatively, they didn't burn much wood. For example, in the 1700s, British people burned about 3.5 million tonnes of wood per year for heating. In modern Britain the Drax power station alone burns 6 million tonnes of wood per year (Source: Jean Baptiste Fressoz)
@@domtweed7323 No, the primary wood burned for industry was charcoal, and used in great quantity. Deforestation occurred to open up more farmland. Forests were being productively managed for centuries beforehand.
@rottenmeat5934 How large precisely was the charcoal industry? Do you have stats? I know it was extremely important, particularly for making iron, but I would have thought the volumes of iron produced would have been so small as to not use a significant amount of wood (exception specific regions with mining). And you're right, there was massive deforestation for farming. But I suspect it didn't involve much active wood harvesting (particularly cause upland trees don't produce thick, straight timber). I suspect the main mechanism was passively allowing the sheep to eat the saplings for centuries, and possibly some artificial fires.
@@domtweed7323 I refer you to the Howes article: I’m no expert myself. I can’t link to it because the hounds who run UA-cam now delete all links in comments.
Can't tell you how much I appreciate you. History is truly a craft, and you have an appreciation for your craft. There's plenty of other explainers: I like professor Dave, but his history content isn't quite right. Unlike the "hard" sciences, one really can't just run through and just shoot facts out. It's really baby steps and context. I kinda like "the prehistory guys," but again, they often don't really seem to take their craft seriously. I think you have the proper balance of how to parse it all out and be respectful the cultures of antiquity. Thank you, good sir.
I'm loving all the new videos. Writing at this pace is a feat in and of itself, but writing content this good is a real herculean task. Thank you for all your work!
I used to work in the cement industry for more than 20 years. We used a lot of alternative fuels to fire our clinker kilns. It makes both economic and environmental sense. I find it fascinating to learn that Greeks and Romans used olive residues for so many uses, including tile production.
You find olive oil pumice in olive oil pressing places .It was used in some places in Greece until 1945-6 before the use of petroleum! I believe they sold the by-products of olive pressing and it was very cheap only it had some smell ! Olive pressing by modern type presses can extract more olive oil than the old ones !And people used olive oil for lighting for thousands of years! Very interesting topic Thanks!
I read in some articles in the past that according to pollen research, Greece used to be densely covered in woods but was deforested during the Bronze Age and a lot of the topsoil was eroded then. However, it then became suitable for planting olive trees. I assume the residue of olives then became a good fuel source all over the Mediterranean.
Very nice video. Good to see you and your sources are considering the context of the overall site rather than just what is in the trench. My first dig was in 1968 and the field is much more comprehensive now. One thing I would add is the human energy component. As Ian Morris mentions in Why the West Rules - for Now (2010), Roman civilization had a "hard ceiling" of 31,000 kilocalories per capita before its collapse and it wasn't until the advent of industrial use of fossil fuels that civilization regained that threshold a thousand years later. The "hard ceiling" was only possible because of institutionalized slavery and the gold reserves of Dacia and other conquered countries. Gold + slaves = civilization. (The Vikings did a hit-and-run version of this which explains how they lasted as long as they did.) The point here is that grape pomace as a source of fuel was only possible because of slave labor. In our modern world with machines that use diesel, pomace from various sources will not give a high enough energy return on investment without slave labor. I have done my own research on sustainable farming as a market gardener for many years and my EROI from manual labor + small amounts of gasoline in a walk-behind tiller provided an EROI of 3.0:1 (actually 2.5 to 3.5:1 depending on the year). This is an output/input ratio that exceeds biodiesel and ethanol, which are about 1:1 or less. The EROI would be higher than 3:1 with slave labor (poor housing, longer hours, less food, food of a higher calorie/lower protein ratio, etc.) Shale oil is only around 5:1 or less and LNG is probably around the same EROI if one factors in the conversion on both ends. The system I used for objectively measuring sustainability is in my first book, The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013) and available on Amazon, should anyone wish to pursue this line of thinking further. Good luck in your researches.
Even grape seeds in Italy are still used as fuel today. Its calorific value is 3,350 Kcal/Kg. Slightly lower than that of olive seeds which is 4,900 Kcal/Kg.
Grape vines get pruned each year, so they would also have lots of vine pruning to burn. They also had hazel nuts, again a by product, coppice hazel for firewood, you get nuts as a by product
@@nunyabiznes33 not just farming, but at least in the mountains of scotland and wales, they killed all the predators, then large erbivores eat all the growing trees as soon as they poop out of the soil and then just within 1 generation of mature trees life, the forest dies out. of course sheep grazing was a major cause as well
Neolithic farmers cannot possibly have cut them all down. Even during medieval clearings, the oldest, biggest trees that would have required to much effort to fell were left standing in the fields. They had no chainsaws back then. The result was a sort of cultivated svannah, with woods left around hollow streams and around springs as well as some northern facing slopes, mostly. I think it's probable that two or three generations after initial settling, most of their firewood would be from pollards and coppices, just like their descendants have done ever since until the 1950's.
I really appreciate the choice of your topic. I'm currently reading "Islamic And Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages" by Thomas F. Glick and the effects of deforestation on Iberian agriculture is sometimes mentioned.
My brother heats up his house with that dried olive press leftover stuff. He lives in Crete and there it's quite competitive energy source in terms of price.
The Greeks cut the forests of ancient Greece down over the centuries and wild fires before the Roman empire popped up, ... some ancient Greek author wrote that Greece was more bare rock than in the past
@@samsonsoturian6013 My understanding is that if you put wine in a vessel it will "keep" for a long time. But if you put other alcoholic beverages like beer in a vessel their "shelf" life is relatively short. Port wine for example will stay potable for literally centuries.
I've only stumbled upon this channel within the last couple of weeks. This has been my favourite of your recent uploads. What a fascinating topic to cover!
This is amazingly interesting that the residue of olives after being pressed has been used for fuel. Having been used for kilns would have meant that it could achieve high temperatures. Thanks for this eye-widening video!
I subscribed because this is the first mo fo I have seen in years that did not do the song and dance about subscribing and smashing the like button, and feeding the algorithm and helping the channel, blah, blah, blah... There is not a soul on the planet that is unaware of how that works.
Fascinating video! I had heard of using olive oil as fuel for lamps, but I never read that it was one of the primary fuel sources for the Greeks and Romans. Given just how massive the olive oil industry was in the Roman Empire, I suppose it makes sense. I look forward to the second part of this deep-dive into Roman fuel sources! :)
This is my favorite history channel now. You touch on topics that are really illuminating about the material reality of people in the classical period, not just memeifiable historical factoids (which are fun don't get me wrong). Also worth noting, I work in an area where a lot of people still use bio-fuel for home heating, and where I work sells these blocks of compressed byproduct of the timber industry and it sounds very similar to these olive oil byproduct pomace blocks used for fuel in Rome.
I remember a video about an old florest in England where a lot of trees still have the branches altered by the people who lived close to it centuries ago. Is something about how florest in medieval movies are not well represented, because they are not random trees, but arranged to be harvested later.
What Americans don't realize is our forests are also tree farms, we just don't actively manage them since we don't need too. It makes use for land that is no good for anything else
@@shawnstrittmatter4783 Coppicing is where the stump is left after cutting down the tree's trunk then allowing the naturally occurring shoots to grow until they are 2-3" in diameter and harvesting these rods. Since they're able to use the existing root structure from the stump they can grow quickly. The rods could be used for wattles (of wattle and daub construction) or dried for use as fire wood. Pollarding is a similar practice where the tree is cut 6-8 feet above the ground so the shoots can't be reached by grazing animals like cattle, sheep or goats that grazed the plantations.
This was a fantastic presentation and I'll break one of my customs here, by subscribing without watching 3 videos prior. The content was presented so professionally that it's clear to me I shall quite enjoy my time here and there's no need to further vet your content.
I expect that transporting pomace was potentially dangerous for both ships and ports because of fire hazard. That could possibly explain why they transported ceramics rather than pomace.
Thank you very much. I have always wondered at the amount of fuel needed to maintain the Roman Empire and this adds information. I knew the romans used olive oil for lighting but the pomice I knew nothing about. I must do more reading.
Skimming through UA-cam for something interesting. Come across this interesting heading. Okay, let's watch. You certainly did not disappoint. Very, very interesting.
They managed? Bruh. In Turkey there is an ancient city called sagalassos, it built in a highland in south western Anatolia. One of the reasons the city built there was the forests around the city that gave the city prosperity. Go and visit the city, and try to see the forests. When Turks came, the city was already declared, and it was not the Turks who cut all the trees down. Go and wander in mediterranean lands, try to see forests except in mountains. Even the mountains are covered with maquis instead of old forests. Perhaps romans had not the means of clearing the mountains of forests, it was the later generations doing, but mediterranean had been deforested. They burned olive pomace (prina they called) for it was cheaper, and the forests were already cut down
I work as a bush regenerator - my job involves removing weeds, replanting native vegetation and maintaining those plantings. Knowing that people have been replanting forests for timber and fuel for millennia, I wonder what the job of a Roman-era reforestation worker (probably a slave) would be like.
Great topic choice! I did Roman history as an undergraduate a few years before your sources start, and I remember the level of olive production being a contentious issue with the assumption being that you'd only use it as a food product (at least, I don't remember any discussion of it). Really interesting to come back to a topic after two decades and see how it's come along.
"Fuels used in Ancient Rome" is an interesting topic, but as for "how did Romans not cut down all the trees" I feel the video kinda missed a big question ... namely whether they actually didn't. I'm not saying I know whether they did or did not (though certainly there's a lot of deforestation talk I hear in context of Rome), but just that when trying to explain something like that the premise should first be explored for its validity.
By far, the most important fuel at that time was animal dung. And it was so because of the sophistication of the economic life of the empire, where there was labour division in many aspects of the economy, so many animals were kept for transportation purposes in compliment of those used in agriculture and the army.
Interesting topic! I follow a lot of ancient history topics but nothing regarding fuel and pomace has ever been mentioned! The closest thing would simply be that low grade oil was used in lamps, but actual cooking, heating, and industry fuels have never been touched on by any source I know of
The need for multiple fuel sources does seem to be needed across time. I do have to mention that there were moments in our recent history when an excess of certain fuels could produce unlivable conditions, smog. That could leave a very thin film of evidence within soil samples if that makes any sense. When you mentioned that one fuel source in apartment dwellings, there had to be some local codes or some historical event that suggested to use that fuel source above the other sources of fuel.
The tenements he talks about (the Latin "insulae") were populated by the urban poor, at least in Rome, and were never really regulated, to my knowledge. They often burned down in fires or collapsed because of shoddy construction.
Before machinery people just couldn't harvest that much wood, so didn't burn so much. For example, in England in the 1700s about 3.5 million tonnes of wood were burned for warmth every year. Now the Drax power station alone burns 6 million tonnes per year! (source: Jean Baptiste Fressoz)
Yeah, I find this absolutely captivating. The field of economics tends to think of labor (animal two and four legged) as being the main source of energy in economic antiquity.. along with sort of the textbook or headline notions of market economies and capitalism.
You'd probably like the book "Farmers of Forty Centuries" by FH King. He toured China, Korea and Japan in 1903. He talks about their farming and lifestyle, essentially the last Agricultural based Nations. In it, he speaks about how they got their fuel from two main sources. 1) they heavily cultivated their forests. And 2) They used the root balls of grains (rice, wheat, millet, etc.) as a very effective and renewable fuel source
I see your collection of Will Durant books up there, My parents had them too, I fell in love with History that way. The Romans are said to have leveled many of the forests of Britain to break Druid resistance to the occupation and facilitate the transport of troops.
Apologies if I come across as rude (or simply, off topic) is your script on a table below the camera? Youre looking down, away from the viewer, a lot. Could you adjust the set up, or perhaps sit and lower the camera to look more straight into it as you read? Excellent video on an interesting topic, one Ive never really considered! Definitely interested in a part 2, or 3, or continuations expanding on added details or differing time periods
Theory: What if many poor communities across the globe used local olive species in farm forests? Food/Profit/Fuel source. If we can filter the fumes as well, could something like using olive pomace work?
In addition I think we can include the Mediterranean climate with mild winters reducing the need for heating. Besides they seem to have organised things in an energy efficient way, for example bakeries that can be seen in Pompeii, presumably less fuel is consumed when a bakery makes bread for its customers than if each customer should make a fire at home to bake bread. I also think they used the heat from the sun deliberately when appropriate, such as when they made Garum.
I think that the really interesting part of this is how creative humans _can_ be when they absolutely _must_ be. Some bright spark said, "Hey, if we cut all of our trees down for making fires we're not going to have any trees to build ships with. We need to find something else to burn! Now!" And, it would seem, other people said, "Oh, hell. He's right!" And they got on finding a solution. Now look at the modern day. "We got enough oil to last us a million years! And even if we don't we can burn coal. Who cares? I'm makin' a pile of money on this and I won't have _that_ changed any time soon, I can tell ya'!"
What you fail to mention is that when the Romans invaded Britain they discovered the locals were using coal,deposits of which unusually break the surface here on the Durham coast..This is a big reason they built Hadrians Wall just to the north of it..They transported it by sea to Rome to use in furnaces to make both tin coated steel armour and float sheet glass..Timber being unsuited for sustaining the high temperatures needed..They also burned coal in boilers for hot water and heating in their villas..Also the size of the population compared to the forests in Europe at the time meant timber shortage was never a problem..Forest conservation in Italy was done to avoid transportation costs not shortage..It was in the Bronze Age before sea trade with highly forested Celtic Northern Europe had been established that the problem occured..There being no bronze age collapse among the Celts..
Plato or one of the big greek philosophers wrote about deforestation around athens, and how the soil was eroding, the harbor silting up and the water springs failing. It might of been in jared diamonds book "collapse"
Another notable tree in that area is Cornelian Cherry. It was almost exclusively used for spears, bows, javelins, and any other wooden weapons or tools. It has a similar density to boxwood and was used for woodcuts and wood engravings in the printing press industry and used for gears due to its strength. It grows to well over 1000 years old and the romans and greeks undoubtedly had access to large amounts of these trees that simply will never exist again. But if you look up the trees today you can see just how much bigger they will need to get until you can get a 7 foot long straight spears out of it. And the berries and bark were used to make red dyes but I couldn’t really find any proof romans used it for their red colors. And it has medicinal properties and Im almost certain due to it being a wartime necessity, that the Romans probably planted it just as much as the olive trees.
I watched a channel called Primitive Living or something where a guy lives in the forest and made his own stone age tools and such. He was by himself, and yet had to move locations because he used up all the resources-- dead wood, and fuel, etc. I have a theory that one factor bringing on the Bronze Age collapse had to do with deforestation because of using wood for ships and crafts, burning wood as fuel, and having livestock eat grass and tear up the ground-- creating dust bowl conditions.
The deforestation of Spain for the armada would be an interesting topic in and of itself.
To be fair, it was a wartime necessity
That’s actually also partly a myth. The bulk of the deforestation was during the XIX and XXth century due to charcoal production. In the Southeast a lot of Mediterranean woods was lost due to farming practices leading to desertification and touristic development.
It's not so much deforestation as it's the removal of trees best suited for shipbuilding. The trees you want for masts and keels are tall, broad, hardy and therefore old. The incentive to replant an oak tree is not that high if it's your great great grandson who will reap the rewards of your foresight. Not to mention the generations in between might cut down growing oaks for a quick buck or to clear land for other uses. It's a generational problem that easily leads to over-exploitation of old wood. Even England grappled with the problem of finding enough big oaks for the Royal Navy. Fortunately the founding of colonies in North America would solve that problem. So in essence, Spain (and other countries) can have plenty of young forests but lack old trees for specific needs such as ship building.
The deforestation actually happened to England not to Spain but UK has a gift for projecting their own miscues into others to hide their own sheet.
Phillip II as an Habsburg ruled the lowlands from Dunkirk to Groningen, Luxembourg and Belgium, Burgundy, as well as the kingdom of Naples and Sicily. So not even all of his fleet was built in Spain.
Cuba and Veracruz Mexico already had their own gigs also.
Has Spaain always been dry? It seem to be more desert than other southern European countries like Italy or Greece.
Speaking for southern Italy, it was my understanding that the Romans did in fact cut down vast amounts of trees suitable for the construction of ships. Even though this does not include wood being used primarily as fuel, the landscape and hills to this day do not support ecologically complex flora. Is this not correct?
You are totally right, even more so visit old Roman ports along a lot of north African coast and most are now more than a mile inland, caused by topsoil blowing into the sea and silting those ports up. Cutting down trees in the area meant it created a dust bowl just like that of America in the 1920s. with a similar economic consequences.
Are you sure it was no a part of cut and burn agriculture?
Would that still have such an impact today though? It's been more than 1000 years, I'm sure the ecology would have recovered from Roman logging in that much time. Maybe you could argue that a forest being cut down while the empire was still around led to people in the medieval period keeping it clear because in their eyes there wasn't supposed to be a forest there but without that kind of "maintenance" I think the forest would have recovered by now
@@roelant8069
That's not how ecosystems work, once you destroy something sufficiently it never comes back. Look at Scotland, look at Ireland. Boith used to be vast forrests, but never again.
@@horsemumbler1 nah, man. It takes 20-30 years for a foliar forest and 80-100 years for a coniferous forest to recover. With no human help.
its amazing how much we dont know about mundane life during one of the most famous time periods ever
It bothers me that a "wood age" is not prominent in our idea of the development of everything. How much writing not on clay tablets? How many wooden monolithic structures? Wooden planes? Not crazy.
Because history doesn't care about the average peasant. We have such a narrow lens of history that's almost exclusively characterized by the rich, up until the last 300ish years.
@@GoodBaleadaMusic there's never really been a wood age. We use wood just as much today as we ever have. The only things that's changed is how we process the trees.
@@Spectre4913 We also use more stone today than we ever have.
@Spectre-wd9dl That's an assumption and is incorrect. No we do not use wood at the same total percentage of our resource use. Our most common uses of stone was as a tool for manipulating wood. The human record is missing 90% of its development and it's lost in the wood that does not preserve like clay or stone.
I have actually seen this. I was visiting Fez Morocco and visited a traditional ceramic factory. The fuel used in the kilns was the leftovers from pressing olives. It burns very hot but makes a lot of smoke.
That's nice. The same thing is also done to coconut shells and sugarcane bagasse.
This is fascinating from a ceramics perspective, as the fuel type will have an effect on the quality & characteristics of the brick and/or pottery fired with it. Wood produces a lot of ash, which will contribute to the glaze surface of ware fired with it, including the terra sigillata red slip ware described. In all of the experiments done recreating Roman pottery and brick, I’ve always seen wood used, never once seen either fired with olive pomace. I 100% bet this would change the final products and their firing process.
This reminds me of how the golden age was fueled in the Netherlands, before the age of coal. We used wind power for mechanical processes and we used peet as fuel. E.g. for making salt, pottery, heating homes, etc. The trees we used in our sawmills, were all imported. The grains we milled in our grain mills were also largely imported. The materials came to where the energy was.
Also, during the Golden Age of the Netherlands a relatively small percentage of the population was involved in agriculture. Emphasis on relatively.
Not correct the Romans used coal widely and the Chinese have been using it for nearly six thousand years ago,recently stepping up coal generation for their so called eco friendly evs..
That sounds wildly inefficient, and if that is Netherlands golden age, I feel bad for them.
Actually, the golden age started at 1588 and the trade with the Baltic region for grain started after 1645. So only near the end of the golden age we started to import grain.
Well it depends on how you define the “golden age” I find a lot of variation in the dates. I suspect the therm is rooted in pop-history
To get an idea of how huge olive plantations at an industrial scale can be, I recommend googling for the Spanish region of Jean.
Actually, all of the southern part of the Iberian peninsula is full of olive plantations, at a smaller scale, but they are still producing 90% or more of the olive oil on the planet. See that Italian branded olive oil in the supermarket? It’s Spanish, blended in Italy.
Right now, they are planning to use these rest of the olive oil production to generate energy. It can also be used for other applications like plastics
Bet Sicily was like that once. Maybe the punic wars back then weren't so much different that USA in the middle east wars these days.
@markVrem I know during 1700’s Sicily was home to hige lemon plantations which supplied lemon juice for the British navy before they switched to limes from Carribean colonies
Do they make jeans there?
@@westrimHe did a typo, it's Jaen. Jeans originate from Genoa, from the Genoese. Jeans alludes to the Genoese
@@VFella lol come on man, it's roughly half, not over 90%.
I remember reading somewhere that the Hellenistic kingdoms depleted the remaining Anatolian forests due to their constant naval warfare. That the Levant lost much of its forests earlier, due to thousands of years of demand from Pharaonic Egypt, which had no trees other than palms but an insatiable demand for timber.
Palms are grass, not trees.
Sure. Thanks for the correction.
They’re trees, just monocot ones.
@@himhim3344guy who doesn't know what a tree is
The Romans did cut down A LOT of trees. But planting so many trees to compensate did help them out.
It's likely they coppiced trees and didn't have to replant anything
The Romans practiced coppice and Pollard forestry and allowed the trees to grow back.
Great video! Really informative. I live in southern Turkey, where we grow our own olive trees, so we dont have to buy olive oil from stores and sell the excess to friends and acqueantinces. The leftovers from the olives, we call Posa or Pirina, are processed and dried. Before natural gas and electric burners, my grandparents would burn that in furnace heaters during winter, use them as fertilizers or as animal feed. Now we sell them to specific merchants that comes along during peak harvesting season and buys them all.
What are the modern buyers using it for?
I have an olive tree in my front yard. The Power company hates it.
12:20 - 12:26 they didnt neccesarily have to always chop down trees for their fuel, they could always collect the dead wood fallen on the forest floor, these rights were carefully guarded.
Plus apparently the romans (and presumably other cultures) cut the trees not at the ground, but a bit higher up. This allowed the tree to continue living and producing many branches, which could later be conveniently be "harvested" again.
This method created "fire wood forests".
@@3gunslingersseems like a very inefficient and tedious way, as you have to dry the wood before using it. Hence cutting it down low is far easier and have less risk of falling
@@GoalOrientedLifting A common European manifestation is called coppicing (in English), and it's quite efficient. It's still done successfully at a commercial scale today. Pollarding, which the Romans did, isn't done today but it was certainly efficient for the scale of most Medieval operations.
Dead wood standing is the best because its dry but not rotten. Their is multiples ways for creating standing dead wood one of the way use by the indigenous of eastern north america and on Europe is girdling (Cut ayway the Bark and the living section all the way around the tree and u Cut the connection between the Roots and the leaves, wich kill the tree) u have a standing dead tree dans can provide fuel wood easily for the best season
Next
The recent article “The Coal Conquest” in Dr. Anton Howes’ “Age of Invention” newsletter/Substack blog also seems pretty relevant, even though it’s about fuel supply and demand in medieval and modern England rather than the Roman Empire. Lots of coppicing and pollarding. Trees were cut down to provide timber for woodworking, but firewood was not generally made by cutting down (entire) trees.
People also forget that, comparatively, they didn't burn much wood.
For example, in the 1700s, British people burned about 3.5 million tonnes of wood per year for heating. In modern Britain the Drax power station alone burns 6 million tonnes of wood per year (Source: Jean Baptiste Fressoz)
@@domtweed7323 No, the primary wood burned for industry was charcoal, and used in great quantity.
Deforestation occurred to open up more farmland. Forests were being productively managed for centuries beforehand.
@rottenmeat5934 How large precisely was the charcoal industry? Do you have stats? I know it was extremely important, particularly for making iron, but I would have thought the volumes of iron produced would have been so small as to not use a significant amount of wood (exception specific regions with mining).
And you're right, there was massive deforestation for farming. But I suspect it didn't involve much active wood harvesting (particularly cause upland trees don't produce thick, straight timber). I suspect the main mechanism was passively allowing the sheep to eat the saplings for centuries, and possibly some artificial fires.
@@domtweed7323 I refer you to the Howes article: I’m no expert myself. I can’t link to it because the hounds who run UA-cam now delete all links in comments.
@@leocomerford Howes who? I'm going to look into this
Can't tell you how much I appreciate you. History is truly a craft, and you have an appreciation for your craft.
There's plenty of other explainers: I like professor Dave, but his history content isn't quite right. Unlike the "hard" sciences, one really can't just run through and just shoot facts out. It's really baby steps and context.
I kinda like "the prehistory guys," but again, they often don't really seem to take their craft seriously.
I think you have the proper balance of how to parse it all out and be respectful the cultures of antiquity.
Thank you, good sir.
I had never heard of olive pomace. This is very fascinating, thank you.
I'm loving all the new videos. Writing at this pace is a feat in and of itself, but writing content this good is a real herculean task. Thank you for all your work!
I used to work in the cement industry for more than 20 years. We used a lot of alternative fuels to fire our clinker kilns. It makes both economic and environmental sense. I find it fascinating to learn that Greeks and Romans used olive residues for so many uses, including tile production.
Parents: He is probably watching porn or playing videogames
Me: "How Did Romans Manage to Not Cut Down All the Trees For Fuel?"
Truly a fascinating and under-researched topic. Thanks for the video!
You find olive oil pumice in olive oil pressing places .It was used in some places in Greece until 1945-6 before the use of petroleum! I believe they sold the by-products of olive pressing and it was very cheap only it had some smell ! Olive pressing by modern type presses can extract more olive oil than the old ones !And people used olive oil for lighting for thousands of years! Very interesting topic Thanks!
I read in some articles in the past that according to pollen research, Greece used to be densely covered in woods but was deforested during the Bronze Age and a lot of the topsoil was eroded then. However, it then became suitable for planting olive trees. I assume the residue of olives then became a good fuel source all over the Mediterranean.
Great video! I love learning about the stuff that actually impacted people’s everyday lives in ancient times.
Very nice video. Good to see you and your sources are considering the context of the overall site rather than just what is in the trench. My first dig was in 1968 and the field is much more comprehensive now. One thing I would add is the human energy component. As Ian Morris mentions in Why the West Rules - for Now (2010), Roman civilization had a "hard ceiling" of 31,000 kilocalories per capita before its collapse and it wasn't until the advent of industrial use of fossil fuels that civilization regained that threshold a thousand years later. The "hard ceiling" was only possible because of institutionalized slavery and the gold reserves of Dacia and other conquered countries. Gold + slaves = civilization. (The Vikings did a hit-and-run version of this which explains how they lasted as long as they did.)
The point here is that grape pomace as a source of fuel was only possible because of slave labor. In our modern world with machines that use diesel, pomace from various sources will not give a high enough energy return on investment without slave labor. I have done my own research on sustainable farming as a market gardener for many years and my EROI from manual labor + small amounts of gasoline in a walk-behind tiller provided an EROI of 3.0:1 (actually 2.5 to 3.5:1 depending on the year). This is an output/input ratio that exceeds biodiesel and ethanol, which are about 1:1 or less. The EROI would be higher than 3:1 with slave labor (poor housing, longer hours, less food, food of a higher calorie/lower protein ratio, etc.) Shale oil is only around 5:1 or less and LNG is probably around the same EROI if one factors in the conversion on both ends. The system I used for objectively measuring sustainability is in my first book, The Laws of Physics Are On My Side (2013) and available on Amazon, should anyone wish to pursue this line of thinking further. Good luck in your researches.
Even grape seeds in Italy are still used as fuel today. Its calorific value is 3,350 Kcal/Kg. Slightly lower than that of olive seeds which is 4,900 Kcal/Kg.
Grape vines get pruned each year, so they would also have lots of vine pruning to burn. They also had hazel nuts, again a by product, coppice hazel for firewood, you get nuts as a by product
In England at least, neolithic farmers had already cut them all down
I've always wondered why whenever I see video of England, it's just endless fields.
@@nunyabiznes33 not just farming, but at least in the mountains of scotland and wales, they killed all the predators, then large erbivores eat all the growing trees as soon as they poop out of the soil and then just within 1 generation of mature trees life, the forest dies out.
of course sheep grazing was a major cause as well
Neolithic farmers cannot possibly have cut them all down. Even during medieval clearings, the oldest, biggest trees that would have required to much effort to fell were left standing in the fields. They had no chainsaws back then. The result was a sort of cultivated svannah, with woods left around hollow streams and around springs as well as some northern facing slopes, mostly. I think it's probable that two or three generations after initial settling, most of their firewood would be from pollards and coppices, just like their descendants have done ever since until the 1950's.
I really appreciate the choice of your topic. I'm currently reading "Islamic And Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages" by Thomas F. Glick and the effects of deforestation on Iberian agriculture is sometimes mentioned.
My brother heats up his house with that dried olive press leftover stuff. He lives in Crete and there it's quite competitive energy source in terms of price.
The Greeks cut the forests of ancient Greece down over the centuries and wild fires before the Roman empire popped up, ... some ancient Greek author wrote that Greece was more bare rock than in the past
I read about the discussion as to why Greece/Rome did not go the beer fermentation route and now I know why.
Because grapes were cheap
Barley is a cool climate, low productivity crop, grapes are a warm climate, high productivity crop. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
@@interstellarsurferdon't the Egyptians also make beer? Do they grow their own barley?
@@samsonsoturian6013 My understanding is that if you put wine in a vessel it will "keep" for a long time. But if you put other alcoholic beverages like beer in a vessel their "shelf" life is relatively short.
Port wine for example will stay potable for literally centuries.
@drmodestoesq beer can be stored in barrels though
I've only stumbled upon this channel within the last couple of weeks. This has been my favourite of your recent uploads. What a fascinating topic to cover!
This is amazingly interesting that the residue of olives after being pressed has been used for fuel.
Having been used for kilns would have meant that it could achieve high temperatures.
Thanks for this eye-widening video!
I subscribed because this is the first mo fo I have seen in years that did not do the song and dance about subscribing and smashing the like button, and feeding the algorithm and helping the channel, blah, blah, blah... There is not a soul on the planet that is unaware of how that works.
I actually never knew really anything about this. Fascinating video, I really enjoyed learning this.
Fascinating video! I had heard of using olive oil as fuel for lamps, but I never read that it was one of the primary fuel sources for the Greeks and Romans. Given just how massive the olive oil industry was in the Roman Empire, I suppose it makes sense.
I look forward to the second part of this deep-dive into Roman fuel sources! :)
Fun to make, and great to listen to. What a fundamental subject- Roman energy policy!
This is my favorite history channel now. You touch on topics that are really illuminating about the material reality of people in the classical period, not just memeifiable historical factoids (which are fun don't get me wrong).
Also worth noting, I work in an area where a lot of people still use bio-fuel for home heating, and where I work sells these blocks of compressed byproduct of the timber industry and it sounds very similar to these olive oil byproduct pomace blocks used for fuel in Rome.
That’s was actually really interesting. Looking forward to part two.
I remember a video about an old florest in England where a lot of trees still have the branches altered by the people who lived close to it centuries ago. Is something about how florest in medieval movies are not well represented, because they are not random trees, but arranged to be harvested later.
Native Americans did similar things to aid in cultivation.
What Americans don't realize is our forests are also tree farms, we just don't actively manage them since we don't need too. It makes use for land that is no good for anything else
I think it is called coppicing
@@shawnstrittmatter4783 Coppicing is where the stump is left after cutting down the tree's trunk then allowing the naturally occurring shoots to grow until they are 2-3" in diameter and harvesting these rods. Since they're able to use the existing root structure from the stump they can grow quickly. The rods could be used for wattles (of wattle and daub construction) or dried for use as fire wood. Pollarding is a similar practice where the tree is cut 6-8 feet above the ground so the shoots can't be reached by grazing animals like cattle, sheep or goats that grazed the plantations.
This was a fantastic presentation and I'll break one of my customs here, by subscribing without watching 3 videos prior. The content was presented so professionally that it's clear to me I shall quite enjoy my time here and there's no need to further vet your content.
Glad to see you’re back. I’m still watching your end of rome series the catastrophist view.
What a great idea for a video!!! Bravo
I expect that transporting pomace was potentially dangerous for both ships and ports because of fire hazard. That could possibly explain why they transported ceramics rather than pomace.
Really glad to see your videos being successful after your return.
Thank you very much. I have always wondered at the amount of fuel needed to maintain the Roman Empire and this adds information. I knew the romans used olive oil for lighting but the pomice I knew nothing about. I must do more reading.
Skimming through UA-cam for something interesting. Come across this interesting heading. Okay, let's watch.
You certainly did not disappoint. Very, very interesting.
From time to time, the personal horizont jumps. Thanks for this video. It created a decent jump in my knowledge about Rome.
Thanks for this.
This was terrific. Very interesting and relevant for contemporary loss of habitat. Thanks!
So happy I found your channel, excellent video
I have wondered about this question for decades!
Thanks so much for publishing this video.
Great topic! I've always wondered how Roman bath houses and the heated floors of villas were fueled.
Fascinating and makes a ton of sense, now I'm wondering where I can get my hands on olive pumace for the next Roman Larp
They managed? Bruh. In Turkey there is an ancient city called sagalassos, it built in a highland in south western Anatolia. One of the reasons the city built there was the forests around the city that gave the city prosperity. Go and visit the city, and try to see the forests. When Turks came, the city was already declared, and it was not the Turks who cut all the trees down. Go and wander in mediterranean lands, try to see forests except in mountains. Even the mountains are covered with maquis instead of old forests. Perhaps romans had not the means of clearing the mountains of forests, it was the later generations doing, but mediterranean had been deforested. They burned olive pomace (prina they called) for it was cheaper, and the forests were already cut down
Really fascinating. Look forward to the second video
I love the niche stuff in history, especially when it has a big effect
That was super interesting. It seems like such an obvious blind-spot in the historical knowledge.
I work as a bush regenerator - my job involves removing weeds, replanting native vegetation and maintaining those plantings. Knowing that people have been replanting forests for timber and fuel for millennia, I wonder what the job of a Roman-era reforestation worker (probably a slave) would be like.
Great topic choice! I did Roman history as an undergraduate a few years before your sources start, and I remember the level of olive production being a contentious issue with the assumption being that you'd only use it as a food product (at least, I don't remember any discussion of it). Really interesting to come back to a topic after two decades and see how it's come along.
Love the video and the info because Roma Invicta! Although I would recommend putting your script at eye level, keep up the good work though
"Fuels used in Ancient Rome" is an interesting topic, but as for "how did Romans not cut down all the trees" I feel the video kinda missed a big question ... namely whether they actually didn't. I'm not saying I know whether they did or did not (though certainly there's a lot of deforestation talk I hear in context of Rome), but just that when trying to explain something like that the premise should first be explored for its validity.
I've been asking this question for years. Thanks for addressing it.
I have thought on this question for so long, thank you HC for addressing this matter
By far, the most important fuel at that time was animal dung. And it was so because of the sophistication of the economic life of the empire, where there was labour division in many aspects of the economy, so many animals were kept for transportation purposes in compliment of those used in agriculture and the army.
Nice library
Great video
Great video man! As an Italian American I thoroughly enjoy Roman history 👍🏼🔥🫒🌳🌲🦅⚔️
Olive pits are still a source of energy today in Tunisia because they are cheap.
Interesting topic! I follow a lot of ancient history topics but nothing regarding fuel and pomace has ever been mentioned! The closest thing would simply be that low grade oil was used in lamps, but actual cooking, heating, and industry fuels have never been touched on by any source I know of
My understanding is that the sugar industry has for hundreds of years burned the cane stalks after the juice has been extracted to fuel the boilers.
The need for multiple fuel sources does seem to be needed across time. I do have to mention that there were moments in our recent history when an excess of certain fuels could produce unlivable conditions, smog. That could leave a very thin film of evidence within soil samples if that makes any sense. When you mentioned that one fuel source in apartment dwellings, there had to be some local codes or some historical event that suggested to use that fuel source above the other sources of fuel.
The tenements he talks about (the Latin "insulae") were populated by the urban poor, at least in Rome, and were never really regulated, to my knowledge. They often burned down in fires or collapsed because of shoddy construction.
This video is bloody marvellous!
Truly interesting and an excellent presentation.
I write this sitting next to a stove in which we burn fuel based on olive stones.
Interesting and very thorough! Thanks!
Before machinery people just couldn't harvest that much wood, so didn't burn so much.
For example, in England in the 1700s about 3.5 million tonnes of wood were burned for warmth every year. Now the Drax power station alone burns 6 million tonnes per year! (source: Jean Baptiste Fressoz)
Nice theory, man, but we all know it was the aliens
Yeah, I find this absolutely captivating. The field of economics tends to think of labor (animal two and four legged) as being the main source of energy in economic antiquity.. along with sort of the textbook or headline notions of market economies and capitalism.
You'd probably like the book "Farmers of Forty Centuries" by FH King. He toured China, Korea and Japan in 1903. He talks about their farming and lifestyle, essentially the last Agricultural based Nations. In it, he speaks about how they got their fuel from two main sources. 1) they heavily cultivated their forests. And 2) They used the root balls of grains (rice, wheat, millet, etc.) as a very effective and renewable fuel source
brilliant! Thanks for the enlightenment upon a very important and interesting topic
I see your collection of Will Durant books up there, My parents had them too, I fell in love with History that way. The Romans are said to have leveled many of the forests of Britain to break Druid resistance to the occupation and facilitate the transport of troops.
Good stuff man
Thank you for this video
I am so impressed with this guy
Apologies if I come across as rude (or simply, off topic)
is your script on a table below the camera? Youre looking down, away from the viewer, a lot. Could you adjust the set up, or perhaps sit and lower the camera to look more straight into it as you read?
Excellent video on an interesting topic, one Ive never really considered! Definitely interested in a part 2, or 3, or continuations expanding on added details or differing time periods
Very clear presentation 😮
Whoop! NZ mentioned!
😊 great presentation thank you. Cheers
Meanwhile, some guy about a thousands years later:
Hey, you know what would make a great fuel source? *WHALES*
I have always wondered this. Great info, THANKS!
Very interesting, thank you. I wonder if the remnants of the pomice from fires were used as agricultural char?
Theory: What if many poor communities across the globe used local olive species in farm forests? Food/Profit/Fuel source. If we can filter the fumes as well, could something like using olive pomace work?
Fascinating. No need to apologise for lack of graphics or illustrations. For my part I can concentrate better without whistles and bells.
Very interesting topic, great breakdown
North Africa used to be the bread basket of the Roman empire.This has certainly changed.
In addition I think we can include the Mediterranean climate with mild winters reducing the need for heating. Besides they seem to have organised things in an energy efficient way, for example bakeries that can be seen in Pompeii, presumably less fuel is consumed when a bakery makes bread for its customers than if each customer should make a fire at home to bake bread. I also think they used the heat from the sun deliberately when appropriate, such as when they made Garum.
As my son said, "There was no such thing as, 'waste,' until modern times. They used _everything!"_
I think that the really interesting part of this is how creative humans _can_ be when they absolutely _must_ be. Some bright spark said, "Hey, if we cut all of our trees down for making fires we're not going to have any trees to build ships with. We need to find something else to burn! Now!" And, it would seem, other people said, "Oh, hell. He's right!" And they got on finding a solution.
Now look at the modern day.
"We got enough oil to last us a million years! And even if we don't we can burn coal. Who cares? I'm makin' a pile of money on this and I won't have _that_ changed any time soon, I can tell ya'!"
What you fail to mention is that when the Romans invaded Britain they discovered the locals were using coal,deposits of which unusually break the surface here on the Durham coast..This is a big reason they built Hadrians Wall just to the north of it..They transported it by sea to Rome to use in furnaces to make both tin coated steel armour and float sheet glass..Timber being unsuited for sustaining the high temperatures needed..They also burned coal in boilers for hot water and heating in their villas..Also the size of the population compared to the forests in Europe at the time meant timber shortage was never a problem..Forest conservation in Italy was done to avoid transportation costs not shortage..It was in the Bronze Age before sea trade with highly forested Celtic Northern Europe had been established that the problem occured..There being no bronze age collapse among the Celts..
Plato or one of the big greek philosophers wrote about deforestation around athens, and how the soil was eroding, the harbor silting up and the water springs failing. It might of been in jared diamonds book "collapse"
The Greek / Hellenistic city of Miletus actually lost its harbor because of the river mouth silting up. The ruins are 10 km from the seashore today.
Another notable tree in that area is Cornelian Cherry. It was almost exclusively used for spears, bows, javelins, and any other wooden weapons or tools. It has a similar density to boxwood and was used for woodcuts and wood engravings in the printing press industry and used for gears due to its strength. It grows to well over 1000 years old and the romans and greeks undoubtedly had access to large amounts of these trees that simply will never exist again. But if you look up the trees today you can see just how much bigger they will need to get until you can get a 7 foot long straight spears out of it. And the berries and bark were used to make red dyes but I couldn’t really find any proof romans used it for their red colors. And it has medicinal properties and Im almost certain due to it being a wartime necessity, that the Romans probably planted it just as much as the olive trees.
I watched a channel called Primitive Living or something where a guy lives in the forest and made his own stone age tools and such. He was by himself, and yet had to move locations because he used up all the resources-- dead wood, and fuel, etc. I have a theory that one factor bringing on the Bronze Age collapse had to do with deforestation because of using wood for ships and crafts, burning wood as fuel, and having livestock eat grass and tear up the ground-- creating dust bowl conditions.
11:57 HEY from Aotearoa New Zealand, feeling seen 😎