The study of the Roman world remains largely focused on the wealthy - the lettered elite like Cicero who penned the majority of textual sources, and the wealthy whose largesse built ancient cities like Rome and Pompeii. Yet 90% of the Roman population were poor, rural peasants, about whose life habits, economies and diet virtually nothing is known.
Support from the National Science Foundation will enable continuation of "The Roman Peasant: Environment and Economies" project, the first systematic attempt to excavate and analyze the houses and farms of the Roman peasantry. Directed by Dr. Kim Bowes of the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with Italian, Dutch, Canadian and Spanish scholars, the project is based in ancient Etruria (western Tuscany, Italy), the region upon which most of the textual models for Roman rural life have been centered. Over a period of three years, the Project will excavate 4-6 examples of Roman peasant farms and habitations. By analyzing their houses, their access to local and imported goods, the organic remains of their meals, mapping local soils and resources, and juxtaposing that data with historical sources (poetry, legal texts and agricultural manuals), the Project aims to reveal the lived experience of this largest, most invisible, group of ancient Romans.
Dr. Bowes and her team hope to show that contrary to most assumptions, the "Roman peasantry" was neither a homogenous group, nor only engaged in subsistence-level economies. Drawing on new ethnographic studies and work on the modern poor, the Project is beginning to show that Roman peasants of all wealth levels relied both on local resources as well as global economic networks, and were highly mobile, exploiting a wide range of environmental resources.
The project will thus address a major gap in both classical archaeology and Roman history. In doing so, it will also contribute to our understanding of modern peasantries and the rural poor, revealing how one of the world's great state systems and global trade networks impacted the lowliest rural dwellers. In exploring the various kinds of power available to rural dwellers - through horizontal, reciprocal relationships and through exploiting their environment - it aims to provide lessons for modern populations.
The project will also have major "human" outputs, training new generations of American undergraduates and graduates with special emphasis on scientific methods - faunal analysis, geoarchaeology, pollen analysis - that don?t often form part of American archaeological training. The Project also sponsors an educational initiative in local primary schools, giving lectures and sponsoring basic "excavations," designed to inspire rural schoolchildren about their own heritage.
