Cultivating Villa Economies: Archaeobotanical and Isotopic Evidence for Iron Age to Roman Agricultural Practices on the Chalk Downlands of Southern Britain

Abstract

Agricultural practices are key for understanding socio-economic change, community organization, and relationships with landscape and the environment. Under the Roman Empire, cereals were vital for supplying urban and military populations, yet cereal husbandry practices within villa landscapes remain underexplored. In this article, the author applies new methods to analyse a large assemblage of charred plant remains from an area of chalk downland in central-southern England in order to evaluate changes in cereal production strategies over the Middle Iron Age to late Roman periods. Archaeobotany, carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis, and functional weed ecology are combined to reconstruct crop husbandry practices, in order to establish the cereal production system of Roman villas and the preceding Iron Age settlements, and to consider the environmental and socio-economic impact of cereal production systems.

Seeing the fields through the weeds: introducing the WeedEco R package for comparing past and present arable farming systems using functional weed ecology

“…The results indicated that differences in fertility and disturbance were the driving ecological processes separating the two regimes, with the highly fertile, highly disturbed Asturian plots contrasting with the low fertility, low disturbance Haute Provence fields. This model has been used in other research to explore the intensity of cultivation in multiple time periods in Germany (Bogaard et al 2016 ; Styring et al 2017 ; Hamerow et al 2022 ; Hamerow et al in press), as well as Iron age, Roman and medieval England (Hamerow et al 2020 ; Lodwick 2023 ) and Iron Age France (Alagich et al 2018 ).…”