Agricultural Production in Roman Italy

Abstract

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New Perspectives on the Medieval ‘Agricultural Revolution’

“…Looking beyond Britain, Roman archaeology continues to focus on change emanating out from Italy, where discussions of agriculture are dominated by historical sources, villas and survey archaeology (Witcher, 2016). The methods of environmental archaeology have been much more slowly adopted.…”

Presenting the Compendium Isotoporum Medii Aevi (CIMA) and Bayesian Case Studies

“…The collapse of the Western Roman Empire (AD 476), the splitting of its territories into separate kingdoms, and the subsequent territorial unification attempt during the Carolingian empire (AD 800-887) mark major historical transitions in Europe. Different sources of historical and archaeological evidence point towards a high diversification of farming and animal rearing in Late Roman to early medieval Europe, yet far from the intensive agricultural economy of the Roman empire (Montanari 1988;Lewit 2009;Witcher 2016;MacKinnon 2019). In concomitance, the arrival of migrating populations may have also shifted dietary habits (Pearson 1997).…”

Did the Roman Empire affect European climate? A new look at the effects of land use and anthropogenic aerosol emissions

“…where Cereals were the nutritional basis in the Roman Empire (Witcher, 2016) and typical yields were recorded by the agronomists of Classical Antiquity. Based on ancient sources and the work of Goodchild (2007) and Hopkins (2017), we estimated that yields representative for the whole Roman Empire are in the range between 500 kg ha −1 and 1000 kg ha −1 (Sect.…”