Drought May Have Driven Raids on the Roman Empire

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Cambridge, drought conditions in the fifth century A.D. may have driven Hunnic peoples from herding animals to raiding the Roman Empire. Susanne Hakenbeck, Ulf Büntgen, and their colleagues reconstructed the region’s climate over the past 2,000 years with tree ring analysis, and found that the area that is now Hungary experienced unusually dry summers in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. The drought was severe enough that crop yields and pasture for grazing herds would have been reduced beyond the floodplains of the Danube and Tisza rivers. “We found that periods of drought recorded in biochemical signals in tree rings coincided with an intensification of raiding activity in the region,” Büntgen said. Hakenbeck added that analysis of isotopes in human bones unearthed in the region suggests that some people migrated from their places of birth and ate mixed agricultural and pastoral diets. Others, however, may have been driven to violence, the researchers argue. Historical records of intense raiding on the Roman frontier coincide with extremely dry summers in the Carpathian Basin, they concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Journal of Roman Archaeology. To read about a group of nomads in the Carpathian Basin who ruled much of Europe from the sixth through ninth centuries A.D., go to "The Avars Advance."