The Roman Peasant Project 2009-2014: Excavating the Roman Rural Poor

"This book presents the results of the first systematic archaeological study of Roman peasants. It examines the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions and movement habitus of non-elite rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany, Italy, during the Roman period. The first half of the book presents the excavation data from eight non-elite rural sites including a farm, a peasant house, animal stall/work huts, a ceramics factory, field drains and a site of uncertain function, here framed as individual chapters complete with finds analysis. The second half of the book examines this data synthetically in thematic chapters addressing land use, agriculture, diet, markets and movement. The results suggest a different, more sophisticated Roman peasant than heretofore assumed. The data suggests that Roman peasants in the 1st c. BC/AD particularly built specialized sites distributed throughout the landscape to maximize use of diverse land parcels. This has important implications for the interpretation of field survey data, estimate of rural demographics from that survey and assumption about the long-term changes to human settlement. It also points to an important moment of agricultural intensification in this period, a contention beginning to be supported by other studies. The project also identified sophisticated systems of land use, including crop rotation and an important investment in animal agriculture. The data similarly present the first systematic data from Roman Italy for rural consumption, tracking the fine wares produced at a production site to local sites nearby. This supports the largely theoretical new work problematizing the so-called consumer city model and suggests the potential importance of rural aggregate demand. Movement studies, based on finds from the sites themselves, describe a more mobile population that previously assumed, engaged in quotidian and long-distance movement patterns, data supported by the small but steady stream of imports and exports into and out of this seemingly liminal region. The book concludes by addressing the implications of this new data for major questions in Roman social and economic history"--