Roman horticulture beyond the frontier: garden cultivation at Iron Age Uppåkra (Sweden)

Abstract

Traditionally, the study of Roman cultural imports to Roman Iron Age societies in Scandinavia has been based on analysis of the artefactual record. The starting point has been artefacts held to be high-status objects deriving chiefly from funerary contexts and, to a lesser degree, from settlement sites. Although the existing evidence at Uppåkra, a high-status settlement site in Scania province, Sweden, comes only from residential contexts, we will address the ongoing debate concerning Roman cultural imports with ecofactual evidence, to consider which aspects of Roman culture were introduced, which parts of Roman society were mediators, and the underlying social reasons for the introduction of the archaeobotanical remains into indigenous Iron Age society.

The king’s spice cabinet–Plant remains from Gribshunden, a 15th century royal shipwreck in the Baltic Sea

“…They likely were introduced from northern areas of continental Europe, where the Roman occupation influenced food production in Germania and spread the knowledge of garden cultivation [ 36 ]. Sporadic finds of black mustard and dill seeds in archaeological contexts are reported from the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE in southern Scandinavia [ 93 , 94 ]. The diversity of seeds from plants linked to gardening increases in Northern Europe around 800–1000 CE [ 32 , 92 ].…”

Exploring Fennoscandian agricultural history through genetic analysis of aged crop materials

“…The genus Brassica contains several agricultural and horticultural crops that have been important both historically but also in present time. The earliest archaeological finds from Sweden have been dated to around 1-400 AD (Larsson and Ingemark, 2015). Which of the multitude of Brassica species and subspecies that were grown has, however, remained unknown as morphological examination of archaeological seeds can only, with some uncertainty, separate between some major groups of seeds within this genus such as B. rapa, B. oleracea, B. nigra and B. napus (Berggren, 1981;Tomlinson and Hall, 1996;Cappers, et al, 2009).…”

“…Brassica cultivation seems to have reached Northern Europe with the expansion of the Roman Empire (Heimdahl, 2010;Rohde Sloth, et al, 2012). Judging both by written sources and the archaeological record, brassicas remained important agricultural and horticultural crops from sometime around AD 1-400 (Roman Iron Age) and into the 19 th century (Larsson and Ingemark, 2015;Hallgren, 2016). The exact Brassica types grown are only partially known from the literature and archaeobotanical record.…”

Movement of agricultural products in the Scandinavian Iron Age during the first millennium AD: 87Sr/86Sr values of archaeological crops and animals in southern Sweden

“…Larger grains were more frequent at the regional center when compared to sites in the surrounding area, indicating that the regional center could have had access to high-quality crop products from other farming communities. The introduction to Uppåkra of vegetables and condiments in the second century AD, based on finds of seeds from plants typically grown in gardens in the Roman empire, demonstrates that a range of garden plants was cultivated locally (Larsson and Ingemark 2015).…”