The Global Roman Countryside: Connectivity and Community

Witcher, Robert

doi:10.1163/9789004345027_004

Cited by 32 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…I believe we should, at least in the period from Augustus to Aurelian, view this phenomenon as one city of different densities, an extended urban landscape, where it was hard to know 'up to what point it is still the city and where it ceases to be the city; so closely is the city connected with the country, giving the beholder the impression of a city stretching out 29 Fletcher 1995;Fletcher 2009. 30 Witcher 2005Malmberg, Bjur 2009;Dyson 2010, 327;Malmberg, Bjur 2011;Witcher 2011;De Ligt 2012;Malmberg 2015;Witcher 2017;Witcher 2020, 172, 195. 31 Malmberg 2021, with references to previous research.…”

Section: Extended Urban Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

A Millennium of Resilience, Vulnerability and Sustainability at Rome, c. 200 BCE-800 CE

Malmberg

2024

Acta

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The contribution uses the four phases of growth, conservation, release, and reorganisation of the adaptive cycle model from resilience theory in a study of developments at Rome in the millennium from the late Republic through late antiquity. In addition, the study applies the concepts of vulnerability and sustainability to investigate responses to crises. The focus is on change in the size of the city of Rome, the relationship between the city and the hinterland, and how society tried to adapt to environmental, economic, political, and social challenges. It concludes that, in the end, the city of Rome proved resilient, and entered the medieval period still the largest city of the Latin world.

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Section: Extended Urban Landscapementioning

confidence: 99%

A Millennium of Resilience, Vulnerability and Sustainability at Rome, c. 200 BCE-800 CE

Malmberg

2024

Acta

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“…5 All the data points to high population density in the early empire, and Robert E. Witcher's cautious suggestion is that the suburbium, which he defines as the area up to 50 km from Rome, had at its early imperial peak about half of Rome's population, perhaps 350,000 people to Rome's 700,000. If one adds the 50 to 100 km zone as a further variable, the total in the suburbium may easily equal the total population in Rome (this includes the densely inhabited areas of northern Lazio) (Witcher 2005;).…”

Section: Macrohistory: the Parameters Of Urban Latiummentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Networks in Latium

Smith¹

2020

Journal of Urban Archaeology

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Rome's hinterland, Latium, has long been a focus of research. It offers a remarkably rich set of information, archaeological, epigraphical, and literary, and especially for the period 200 bc to ad 200. We can see a densely settled countryside with a scatter of urbanized settlements, and we can trace links between them and repetitive cultural behaviours. This paper presents the potential of a new database, combining three major surveys, and relates this first to the model of the globalized countryside, and then argues for the relevance of actor-network theory and assemblage theory. The intention is to encourage a renewed collaborative effort to understand 'urbanity' at a regional level, in central Italy and elsewhere.

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“…That there is little or nothing old-fashioned to these perspectives is perhaps best demonstrated by the very recent archaeological interest in globalization that highlights and promotes the need to focus on local contexts and communities to make sense of connectivities already far back in the past and across the globe (Hodos 2017). As argued by Witcher (2017) for the Roman Mediterranean, rural communities were intimately integrated in much wider networks, which gave rise to what he calls a 'global countryside', which is a term that not coincidentally resonates with Kyle's (2000) 'transnational peasants' in Ecuador.…”

Section: Surveying Rural Pastsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rural works and days – a subaltern perspective

Dommelen

2019

World Archaeology

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The Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato, better known as Cato the Elder, has gone down in history for his insistence that Punic Carthage had to be destroyed, even if Rome had already stripped the North African city of both its overseas and surrounding territories fifty years earlier. He is best known for the expression Cartago delenda est ('Carthage has to be destroyed'), which may or may not be apocryphal, but contemporary accounts of his speeches relate in any case that Cato marshalled material support on the Roman Senate floor in a major speech in what was probably the year 152 BC: both Plutarch (Cato Maior 27.1) and Pliny the Elder (Naturalis Historia 15.74) describe how he brought a handful of ripe, plump 'African figs' to the Senate floor. Even if these figs are likely to have been grown at Cato's central Italian estate, they still reminded his audience of the rapid and extensive recovery that Carthage had made after its crushing defeat by Rome in the Second Punic War (218-201 BC; Meijer 1984). Carthage had for centuries been renowned for the agricultural richness of its territories and its agronomic skills to exploit these, and Cato's figs vividly reminded the Roman senators of the formidable power that their predecessors had faced over the two Punic Wars of the past hundred years or so. Whether or not it was Cato's figs that convinced the Roman senators to go and raze Carthage to the ground in 146 BC remains open to speculation. The point that I would like to make is that rural produce, a horticultural crop, was important enough in Republican Rome, and sufficiently familiar to Roman Senators, to have played a central role in decisions about going to war; it could at least plausibly be presented as having swayed senatorial opinions. Cato is an interesting politician in this regard, as he was also the author of De Agri Cultura, which was as much a farmer's almanac as a reminder to his Roman contemporaries of the importance of rural production. It is no less relevant in all of this that the most famous Carthaginian author was Mago the Agronomist, whom later Roman writers recognized as the 'Father of Agriculture' (Columella, De Re Rustica 1.1.13). Anecdotes and factoids like these readily illustrate what may be a point almost too obvious to make: as a world of preindustrial societies, the Mediterranean of Classical Antiquity was not first and foremost made up of and shaped by city-dwellers, as archaeologists and (ancient) historians such as Collingwood and Finley have long insisted. Major urban centres surely existed, with Rome and Carthage as prime examples, but these societies were also profoundly rural, and the implications of their rural contexts and roots, material and otherwise, were never far awaynot even in an institution that was as urban and elitist as the Roman Senate. This observation goes well beyond the ancient Mediterranean and is indeed put into perspective by the sobering statistic that on a global scale less than 10% of people lived in an urban setting as late as the nineteenth century (AD!)...

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The Global Roman Countryside: Connectivity and Community

Abstract: 90 E.g. in the Biferno valley, rural site numbers decline, though it should be noted that the majority of abandonment concerns off-site and small domestic scatters, whereas most farms and villas continued, Lloyd (1995). 91 For a recent review, see Harding (2013).

Cited by 32 publications

References 27 publications

A Millennium of Resilience, Vulnerability and Sustainability at Rome, c. 200 BCE-800 CE

A Millennium of Resilience, Vulnerability and Sustainability at Rome, c. 200 BCE-800 CE

Urban Networks in Latium

Rural works and days – a subaltern perspective

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