نبذة مختصرة : International audience ; The climatic factor is decisive for olive growing, which is closely dependent on Mediterranean-type climates. Recent prospective studies predict that ongoing global warming will have dramatic consequences for the geography of olive oil-producing areas in the coming decades. Several scenarios predict that the increase in drought will lead to a significant loss of profitability for olive growing in the Eastern Mediterranean, but that this climate change will open up new potential on the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. Such an observation leads us to question the role of past climate change on olive growing, and more particularly the effects of the Roman Climatic Optimum (OCR) and the Little Ice Age of Late Antiquity (LALIA), which have recently been highlighted.Archaeological investigations carried out in recent decades allow us to glimpse important changes in the geography of the producing regions from the Roman Empire until the end of Antiquity. Betica olive growing developed in the first centuries of our era in the south of the Iberian Peninsula but seems to have experienced a significant decline from the third century AD. In contrast, a significant boom in olive growing was seen during the Late Empire in the African provinces, before a strong development during the Byzantine period in the eastern Mediterranean. Did OCR and LALIA play a role in this dynamic ?In this paper, we will present different types of modeling (spatial, agro-ecosystemic, agent-based modelling) that aim to simulate the impact of climate change on ancient olive growing. The results of these models will be compared with archaeological data on olive oil production gathered in a large database that is currently being compiled. Among the first results obtained by our models, it appears that the climatic cooling of Late Antiquity (LALIA) could have played a particularly positive role on the development of olive growing in the Near East during Late Antiquity.
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