Excavating the Roman peasant II: excavations at Case Nuove, Cinigiano (GR)

Abstract

This report details the survey, excavations and materials analysis carried out at Case Nuove (GR) in Tuscany, a site identified by surface survey as a possible rural house, but which excavation and materials analysis suggest was a small-scale agro-processing point of late Republican date. Through accompanying analysis of pollen and land-use data, the article considers the problems this type of site — the stand-alone agro-processing point — presents for interpretations of the Roman landscape.\ud \ud The survey, excavations and materials analysis of Case Nuove revealed a small- scale agro-processing site, serving perhaps as a collective processing point for local farmers but controlled, at least in part, by a local villa. While only a single site in a complex landscape, it is hoped that the results from Case Nuove illuminate the importance of productive and processing activities as components of Roman landscapes and the embeddedness of such activities in their locale, that is, not only in the plant and physical landscapes, but also in the social complex formed by near (and far) human settlement

Quantifying artefacts over time: Interval estimation of a Poisson distribution using the Jeffreys prior

“…; Vaccaro et al . ). Four sites in particular—Pievina (PI), Case Nuove (CN), Podere Terrato (PT) and Podere Marzuolo (MZ)—yielded datable finds of coins from secondary or tertiary contexts (the site of Tombarelle only produced one illegible coin).…”

“…Quantifying random coins has tended to proceed using raw counts by mintage date, grouped per phase or period, or relative to a mean or as a percentage of a total assemblage (Reece 1984(Reece , 1995(Reece , 1996Lockyear 2000;Hoyer 2018). By way of illustration, we can take as a case study the coinage from the Roman Peasant Project, which excavated multiple rural sites in central Tuscany between 2009 and 2014 (Ghisleni et al 2011;Vaccaro et al 2013). Four sites in particular-Pievina (PI), Case Nuove (CN), Podere Terrato (PT) and Podere Marzuolo (MZ)-yielded datable finds of coins from secondary or tertiary contexts (the site of Tombarelle only produced one illegible coin).…”

The Representativeness of Olea Pollen from Olive Groves and the Late Holocene Landscape Reconstruction in Central Mediterranean

“…For our study, we selected Tuscany and Basilicata, two of the most productive agrarian regions in Italy, with large olive groves in their territories (Pisante et al, 2009; Figure 2). These regions couple modern plantations, characterized by different cultivars, with an impressive record of archeological sites preserving evidence of long-term agricultural activity carried out for millennia (Florenzano, 2013;Vaccaro et al, 2013;Bowes et al, 2015). Therefore, we have the opportunity to directly compare past (archeological) and present (olive grove) pollen spectra from the same areas.…”

Preliminary study of food residues and cooking practices in the Medieval Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena (Central Italy)

“…traces of ß-sitosterol. Moreover, C 18:1 is similar to C 18:0 in the total lipid extract, while in the hydrolysis on the solid fraction there is abundant oleamide, which could derive from contamination or from a degradation of the C 18:1 (VACCARO et al, 2013). In the hydrolysis of SMS 5 azelaic acid is the highest amongst dicarboxylic acids, suggesting (together with ß-sitosterol) the presence of a vegetable oil, possibly olive.…”