Peasants

Two for Tuesday: The Roman and Late Roman Economy

A couple weeks ago, I made the rookie mistake of reading a pair of intriguing articles on the Roman and Late Roman economy and then setting them aside before I took notes on them. I think I had planned on blogging about both pieces but then travel, mid-semester deadlines, and life got in the way.

Anyway, this morning, I’m catching up and offering a few notes on two recent articles on the Roman economy.

Article the First

I tend to pay attention to Peter Sarris’s work partly because he has become an important voice in the ongoing conversation about the impact of the Justinianic plague, but also because he recognizes that his interest in the rural and peasant economy is an interest in the ancient economy more broadly. His recent article “Peasants and Economic Agency in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: A Byzantine Perspective” in Studia Historica. Historia Medieval 43(2), 2025, pp. 49-60 uses Chris Wickham’s monumental work Framing the Early Middle Ages as a point of departure for a brief and summative reconsideration of the Late Roman/Early Byzantine (e.g. 6th century) economy.

Sarris argues that peasant life showed remarkable continuity even in areas impacted by various invasions and conquests in the Late Roman West. He suggests that the collapse in the distinction between “free” labor (or at least labor bound only to the economic relationship between landlords and peasants) and slave labor reflected a commitment by both Justinian and Germanic rulers to stabilize the rural economy. This reflects larger concerns in the East as well where the Emperor consistently promulgated legislation seeking to bind peasants to their land and to prevent the abandonment of rural properties.

Sarris suggests that the arrival of the bubonic plague in 6th century afforded peasants greater leverage in asserting their (relative) freedom and rolling back aristocratic efforts to bind them to the land or to proprietors. Sarris notes the growing evidence for labor shortages and peasant autonomy in the aftermath of the plague and as late as the 8th century. Sarris, who believes the plague had a lasting and significant impact on the Late Roman and Early Medieval economy, attributed persistent evidence for peasant autonomy and agency into the Early Middle Ages as evidence for the continued disruptions produced by the plagues recurrence in the 7th and 8th centuries.

Article the Second

I also enjoyed Paulina Komar’s recent piece in the European Journal of Archaeology, “Economic Change in the Mediterranean between the Principate and Late Antiquity.” Komar conducts a relatively (for Mediterranean archaeology) large scale analysis of the distribution and date of amphora from various sites across the Mediterranean. She argues that the distribution of amphora during the Roman period reflects the play of an integrated, Mediterranean wide market, whereas the distribution of amphora during the Late Roman period suggests far more local networks of trade. She made these arguments by using the ORBIS Mediterranean travel cost model to compare the distance that various amphora travelled in each assemblage. 

What drew this to my attention was her use of an assemblage of amphora from Paphos.  She noted that over 25% of amphora from the Roman period came from sites of two weeks or greater distance from the city (e.g. Carthage, Naples, Seville, Vienna). During the Late Roman period (or at least the 3rd century) this number drops to less than 4%. The latter reflects a massive increase in Levantine amphora (from 4.5% in the Roman period assemblage to over 20% in the 3rd century assemblage).

The article deserved more attention than I am offering it here, but it is striking that the percentages present at Paphos find parallels elsewhere in the Mediterranean in both the Roman and Late Roman period. 

Wreading Wednesday: Off Site Scatters and Survey Archaeology

I read with some excitement the very recent article by Martina Cecilia Parini and Martijn van Leusen in the Journal of Field Archaeology titled “Analyzing Low-Density Assemblages from Fieldwalking Surveys: Hellenistic and Roman Land Use in the Sibaritide (Calabria, Italy).” The article is rich and complex like so much good methodological work is. 

The article looks at two key concepts that are fundamental to the interpretation of intensive pedestrian survey. First, it compares two datasets from the Castrovillari Survey Project (CSP) and the Raganello Archaeological Project (RAP). Second, instead of focusing on sites, this article focuses on off-site scatters and uses a comparative approach to shine new light on what was going on in the countryside.

The authors do a thoughtful job working to integrate two survey datasets developed according to very different practices and methods. While collection methods were roughly the same, the way that projects described their finds required calibration between the projects. More importantly, both projects defined sites (and off-site scatters) in the field and this effectively eliminated the tricky (and problematic) work of site definition. The downside of this, of course, is that site definition is the name of the game. If a project already calibrates its approach in the field to recognizing distinctive low density scatters as sites, then the entire category of “off-site” begins to become more complicated. This, however, is a discussion for another day, but it is worth noting that the authors of this article recognized that artifact densities and visibility were not statistically related to one another and that the diversity of low density scatters is often a useful indicator of low density activity in the past. 

The main conclusions in this article that off-site scatters in the Hellenistic and Roman period appear to hint at low-density rural activity when at lower elevations and on low marine terraces. On higher marine terraces off site material appears to follow a different pattern and is more common immediately surrounding known sites. More than that, attentiveness to the chronology of artifacts — rather than simply total densities — also suggested patterns. Hellenistic appears more common offsite which suggests to the authors that manuring may have been more common in that period than in the Roman period where less intensive agricultural regimes existed.

I like this paper. It continues work that me and my colleagues have long pondered during our time conducting surveys in Corinth, the Argolid, and on Cyprus. Moreover, it is bolstered by recent work conducted by the Roman Peasant Project which excavated rural sites and confirmed that some low-density scatters do represent low intensity activities from habitation to the more banal requirements of drainage and storage in the ancient countryside. At the risk of sounding like a pollyanna, the publication of additional survey datasets from the Mediterranean will produce more points of comparison and contribute to the kind of sophisticated analysis done by these authors.

This, of course, leads me to a critique. This is a fine article that represents a good bit of thoughtful analysis, but the data upon which their conclusions rest is not available. If this was for an ongoing survey or projects that continued to be active in some way, it is understandable to be parsimonious with data access ostensibly (at least) to protect researchers. The two projects used in this article, however, are over 20 years old and the authors themselves refer to them as a legacy projects. It would have been amazing if the authors could have made them available for researchers who want to critique or expand their conclusions.

Small Rural Sites in Cyprus

This weekend I read Catherine Kearns’s and Anna Georgiadou’s recent article in the Journal of Field Archaeology (2021): “Rural Complexities: Comparative Investigations at Small Iron Age Sites in South-Central Cyprus.” The article is good for a number of reasons and should be added to any reading list on rural Mediterranean landscapes. If you have time (and are into that kind of thing), you should just go read it.

Without summarizing a fairly short article, Kearns and Georgiadou report on their work at two rural sites which they documented using intensive survey, remote sensing (magnetometry and ground penetrating radar), and targeted excavation. But that’s not all! The site of Kalavasos-Vounaritashi was initially identified by the Vasilikos Valley Survey and the site of Maroni-Vournes by the Maroni-Vournes Archaeological Survey Project. The former took place in the 1970s and 1980s and the latter in the 1990s. Kearns and Georgiadou’s work, then, not only followed recent trends toward examining using more intensive methods small sites initially identified by archaeological survey  (perhaps best exemplified in the Roman Peasant Project) and also reflects a growing interest in rural landscapes defined by small (and sometimes ephemeral) scatters of ceramics. 

Both sites stand in the territory of the city of Amathus in valley that connected copper ore producing area of the Troodos Mountains to the sea and also provided access to timber, gypsum, and undoubtedly agriculturally productive area upon which the city and local communities could draw. These rural sites, however, were not simply economic outposts of the urban center, but also defined regional religious landscapes with shrines, defensive landscapes with military installations, and transportation landscapes with routes and roads. For archaeologists, however, the challenge has been that these landscapes have largely been assumed rather than argued. Unpacking the function of sites in rural landscapes is a long standing challenge for archaeologists as short term or seasonal habitation, short lived religious sites, temporary or periodic fortified locations, and a wide range of small scale production sites can all produce surface assemblages of remarkably similar appearance. Moreover, many small scale rural activities are likely not to appear at all on the surface or blink on and off according to plough zone activity, erosion, and seasonal changes in visibility.

Work like that done by Kearns and Georgiadou plays a key role in not only understanding rural landscapes but also the relationship between surface and sub-surface material in the countryside. What was particularly valuable about this article is that that authors demonstrated how their methods – from survey to remote sensing – did not necessarily produce the kind of obvious correlations between the data collected from the surface and excavation results. In fact, the excavated remains were quite modest (and pretty reminiscent of the results from our first season of excavation on the height of Pyla-Vigla). It strikes me that this kind of transparency in the publication of problem-focused and methodological archaeological field work is pretty valuable.

Finally, the focus of this article on the Cypriot Iron Age reminds me that if I had to do it over again, I might have focused some of my research on this important transitional period on the island. The political coalescing of the Iron Age kingdoms, the changes in rural settlement and economy, and the role that sanctuaries and fortifications played in defining the these kingdoms’ territories offer a brilliant range of significant questions for archaeology. 

One last thing. As far as I can tell, this article also included the first reference to Katie Kearns’s book, which is listed as “in press” with Cambridge University Press. I’m looking forward to reading it:

Kearns, C. In press. The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Terrace Tuesday is NOT a Thing (But It Should Be)

This weekend I read an article in the most recent issue of Antiquity titled “Agricultural terraces in the Mediterranean: medieval intensification revealed by OSL profiling and dating” by (takes a deep breath) Sam Turner, Tim Kinnaird, Günder Varinlioğlu, Tevfik Emre Şerifoğlu, Elif Koparal, Volkan Demirciler, Dimitris Athanasoulis, Knut Ødegård, Jim Crow, Mark Jackson, Jordi Bolòs, José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, Francesco Carrer, David Sanderson, and Alex Turner. 

The article, as the title implies, uses optically stimulated luminescence to date terraces from across the Mediterranean. The date of terraces is a perennial problem in the archaeology of the Mediterranean countryside. Not only are terraces ubiquitous in many areas of the Mediterranean basin, but they present a series of intriguing archaeological challenges. For example, terraces often functioned for multiple generations, underwent repairs, and contributed to landscape that reflected a palimpsest of economic, social, and political relationships to rural agricultural production. Developing a system to date terrace walls successfully and at scale has become a bit of a white whale for archaeologists interested in the Mediterranean countryside with targeted excavations, complex GIS analyses, and ethnoarchaeological approaches offer limited, but at times valuable insights.

The project described by Turner et al. uses optically stimulated luminescence at scale to date terrace walls from sites across the Mediterranean. From what I understand, OSL allows one to date samples according to when they were last exposed to light. This appears to involve some kind of science. By taking a series of samples at various depths from behind terraces, Tuner et al.’s work was not only able to identify how the terrace was built, often by recognizing the reverse stratigraphy associated with a cut-and-fill approach to construction, but also, in many cases, date the terrace. Since the article is open access you can go and read it and appreciate the authors’ careful attention archaeological process in their evaluation of the the OSL dates for terrace walls. Note that they also provided the data that supported their arguments as a download, but oddly presented it in as an .xlsx file rather than as a more basic file format. 

The article is more than just methodology. The authors’ argue on the basis of the samples that the terraces that there were two major periods of terrace building and modification: the mid-12th century and the early-16th century. On Naxos, where some of the samples were taken, these periods did not necessarily coincided with known settlement in the same region. More significantly, the dates associated with the terrace walls do not seem to coincide with artifact scatters on the surface or more monumental features in the landscape. 

In other words, the construction of these terraces is not something that left a marked trace in the landscape. Of course, it is hardly surprising that the construction of terraces didn’t leave a material trace in the landscape, but one would have liked to see traces of increased activity associated with the terrace walls. At the same time, it’s interesting to think of terraces not as necessarily productive features in the landscape, but as aspirational features that reflected the hope for increased agricultural productivity. It may be that the factors that encouraged the investment in terraces at one point in the past did not mature according to plan or perhaps only supported episodic use. In other words, the scenarios that resulted from the increased investment in the landscape may not have left a clear material signature outside of the investment itself.

In this context, the ability to date a terrace or a terrace system consistently offers a window into a aspirational landscape that may or may not coincide with other material traces. This alone offers a distinctive perspective on rural life.      

Archaeology, Nationalism, Destruction

Earlier this summer, I was wandering around an “abandoned” 20th century seasonal settlement in the Western Argolid with a few colleagues, and while we spent time documenting the site and looking carefully at the buildings there, we were also using the site as a way to think (until I was attacked by some kind of bug that had gotten into the sleeve of my long-sleeve and started, understandably, to attack me. Then, there was no thought, just sheer panic. I still have scars, but no one on WARP seemed to really care.).

P1020561

One thing that we discussed was how sites like these fit awkwardly into the dominant archaeological narrative of the Greek nation. The site was not monumental, for example, nor do its buildings and artifact celebrate the something singular, transcendent, and distinctive about either this corner of the Argolid or the Greek world. Moreover, the site did not fit into a clear stage in the settlement in the Greek countryside. It revealed neither progress nor persistence, but irregular adaptation and modification through time. In many ways, the episodes of abandonment and use defied the more linear narrative of archaeological history which celebrated the development of the Greek state, the Greek world, and – broadly speaking – the West over time. We wondered how publishing sites like these might complicate narratives of the past by showing how the present (or at least the recent past) defies the kind of tidy interpretative trajectory presented by the dominant archaeological and national narrative. Maybe attention to sites like these can disrupt some of the more colonial elements of Classical archaeology by recognizing a Greek past that doesn’t necessarily contribute neatly to a sense of shared or common heritage with the West or even the Greek nation as a coherent cultural unit.

Two recent articles have further engaged my thinking about archaeology and the nation (which has begun to feel a bit like an evergreen topic of study for a generation of archaeologists who came of age in the late 20th and early 21st century). A colleague (h/t Grace Erny!) sent a copy of Vasileios Varouchakis’s recent piece in Public Archaeology (2018), titled “Indigenous Archaeologies of Crete, 1878-1913.” Varouchakis considers the rise of a national archaeology during the period when Crete was an independent protectorate of the great powers (which he argued paralleled and anticipated the national archaeology when Crete became part of the Greek state). Instead of just tracing the emergence of archaeological institutions and projects at the state or international level, however, Varouchakis examined role of local communities in creating an indigenous archaeology on the island. In some cases, this involved working closely with archaeologists on projects that represented shared interest like a switch-back path to the cave above Psychro village which provided access for archaeological work as well as the nutrient rich deposits valued as fertilizer. Restaurants and hotels for visitors followed archaeological projects as did the opportunities for paid work for Cretan peasants. The interaction with both foreign and local archaeologists in these “contact zones” remains familiar to anyone working on a foreign project today, but also served as a space for Cretans to learn the value of archaeology and archaeological artifacts to the state and its partners. This knowledge, then, also provided a foundation for acts of resistance among communities on Crete who recognized the value of archaeology in securing attention for their grievances and advancing their cause. Acts of resistance involved damaging archaeological sites intentionally or by simply ignoring them, deliberate acts of looting, and constructing narratives of their landscape that reject the official narrative promoted by the state and foreign archaeologists. This indigenous archaeology, however, was not some autochthonous view of the past, but a dialogue with the official narrative and a constituent force in creating the contemporary archaeological landscape of the island. Varouchakis’s article gleans from the official record the barest glimpses of the interaction between archaeologists and peasants on the island, but it is enough to recognize the dynamic circumstances in which the formal archaeological narrative emerged.

Christopher Jones’s recent article in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies 6 (2018), “Understanding ISIS’s Destruction of Antiquities as a Rejection of Nationalism,” likewise considers archaeology’s key role in constructing the modern nation, by arguing that ISIS’s destruction of archaeological sites was less directed at various communities living in the Middle East (e.g. Christians, Jews, or various Muslim groups) or even some chimerical pagan past ready to reassert itself, but against efforts by secular states across the region to use archaeology to construct national identities independent of religious affiliation and grounded in a Western, colonial past. To make his argument Jones explored the use of the pre-Islamic past in the state propaganda of the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria and demonstrated how ISIS efforts to attack these sites had meaning as part of an explicit counter propaganda campaign.

What’s intriguing in both of these articles is not so much that they argue that archaeology has become part of national narrative, but that resistance to the power of the modern nation state has manifest itself in anti-archaeological ways. On the one hand, this isn’t surprising; but, on the other hand, it reminds me that archaeology is part of a larger modern discourse that exposes it to negotiations and challenges both from within modern view of the world and from without. 

The Slow Movement and Modernity

I keep turning over in my head ideas for a contribution to North Dakota Quarterly’s issue dedicated to the slow movement that I’m co-editing this fall (go here for the call for papers!). While I suspect I’ll write something on slow archaeology, I spent some time this weekend with Paul Halstead’s new book Two Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean (2014) and it got me thinking about our current fascination with slow in the context of the preindustrial world.

Halstead’s book looks, in part, on the rhythms of pre mechanized farming in Greece through several decades of ethnographic and archaeological research. One thing that comes through in his work is that very little about the process of farming in the preindustrial world was properly slow. In fact, during crucial times of the year – like when harvesting and threshing overlap or when multiple fields require plowing – there is constant pressure on the farmer to move from one task to the next. Halstead’s informant on Amorgos harvested in the morning, transported around mid-day, and threshed in the afternoon. Time pressure also accompanied sowing and plowing routines in the fall when delaying by even a day risks the loss of seed to birds or miserable situation of having to plow waterlogged fields. Constant communication with members of the community as well as strategic collaboration ensured that farmers kept abreast of situations present in distant or dispersed fields. 

At the same time I was reading this, I was reading over some of the buzz about the unplugging movement and the National Day of Unplugging (March 7-8). The idea behind unplugging relates somehow to an ancient practice of taking a day of rest where you disengage from the rest of the world. Whether the organizers have understood these “ancient” ideas correctly or not is less a concern than the general indulgence in anachronistic notions among unpluggers and slow advocates. They seems to hang onto this romantic notion that somehow life was slower, less rushed, less dominated by the press of time in the past. Advocates of the infamous “work-life balance” likewise harken back to a mythical day when work and life were sufficiently well defined to be set in balance against one another.

The irony, of course, is that questioning the value of a hectic pace of life is a luxury available only in modern, industrialized societies. In other words, it is a profoundly modern indulgence that we can slow down without fear of crops being ruined and we can disengage from our social networks without losing information vital to our survival as individuals or a family. 

Does this irony undermine the basic idea that a slower, less distracted pace of life is better? I don’t think it does. Certainly, the intense pace of life experienced by farmers in a preindustrial economy was not conducive to long, healthy lives. In fact, Halstead points out that the toil of harvesting alone was something that 20 or 30 years olds could endure best, but older folks – you know, in their 40s! – avoided, reminds us that the physical exertions of premodern life were intense and, by modern standards, debilitating. Maybe remembering this will help us keep our rhetoric in check a bit. Slowing down and unplugging are modern indulgences available to a very small number of individuals in the wealthy, western world. We should celebrate these opportunities, but always realize that they very tools that we blame for the robbing us of work/life balance are the the same tools that have allowed us to define work and life as separate entities.

A Review of Metaponto 4

This past month, I spent some time reading and reviewing Eremina Lapadula’s The Chora of Metaponto 4: The Late Roman Farmhouse at San Biagio. I’ve blogged about it already, but now I have a rough draft of the review ready for your consideration.

I’ve been thinking a good bit about how I write book reviews lately. I tell my students that there are three kinds of reviews with three kinds of theses, and the best reviews explain how a book works rather than what a book says.

1. This book is good because…
2. This is book is good, but…
3. This is not a good book because… 

In practice, however, I’ve found it more difficult to pull this off. The review below is probably my least successful effort. On the one hand, it’s reasonably thorough and critical. On the other hand, it is entirely unremarkable.

(On the third hand, it is also more or less done and off my plate before my summer work commences…)

Late Roman Peasants

One of the best things about the holiday break is that I can make a small dent in my almost endless reading list. First on this list was Cam Grey’s Constructing Communities in the Late Roman Countryside (Cambridge 2011). This book continued a useful trend in the study of Late Antiquity by investigating economically marginal groups that scholars have traditionally overlooked. Grey studies the peasant to build a picture of rural communities during the Late Antique era. This not only resonates with longstanding interests in peasants (particularly among British Marxists) as transhistorical phenomenon, but also with the traditional questions that focus on the fate of the countryside (and by extension the economy) in Late Antiquity. Rather than emphasizing the rural basis for, say, the Late Roman economy, however, Grey explored the forms of social relationships formed by peasants (as agents!) in Late Antiquity.

As an aside, Grey’s book continued along a path first hacked out by T. Gallant in his Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece (Stanford 1991). This is one of my favorite books on ancient Greece and it works to bring together textual and archaeological evidence with global conversations about peasants in the contemporary world. While Gallant’s work is more theoretically explicit, Grey’s work continues on the trajectory that Gallant set out by looking at the complex set of social relationships that helped to manage risk and survival in the ancient world.   

This book has been out for long enough to generate some nice reviews, so I won’t add my meager musings to this chorus, but I will offer a few little observations:

1. Texts. Archaeologists usually imagine that their methods provide the key to understanding the non-elites in the premodern world.  Grey’s book is unapologetically historical and uses textual sources in new ways to sketch out a picture of the Late Roman peasant. In some cases, he does this by reading against the grain of traditional elite sources; in other cases, he uses the remarkable archive of papyrus sources from the Egyptian desert. (As a small critique, it does feel like he sometimes relies quite heavily on a small number of particularly robust papyrological sources). His approach to these texts is sensitive to genre, authorship, and regional variation. The last of these is particularly significant in that he is sensitive to the differences in peasant relations in the East and West.

2. Resistance. The elite bias of most of our primary sources and the historical interest in institutions over individuals has made the search for non-elite resistance in Late Antiquity difficult.  Grey does not provide revolutionary insights into the practices of peasant resistance, but does begin the difficult process of reconsidering elite sources by looking for ways in which dominance implies resistance, for the use of encoded transgressive acts (like demonic possession), and for the subtle negotiations that not only bond peasants to the elite, but also underscore the peasant’s role in creating their place within Late Roman society.

3. The Church and the Poor. One of Grey’s most valuable contributions was his effort to understand the role of the church in caring for the rural poor. He argues that the church was far more interested in helping individuals who had encountered a rapid change in wealth than those who permanently situated near the bottom of the economic system. This coincides well with the role of most institutions in the premodern world which were far better at providing momentary redress in a crisis than producing policies designed to redistribute wealth or mitigate endemic economical inequality. 

Grey’s book continues to open new perspectives on the life of the rural poor and the structure of rural society in the later Roman world. As archaeologists – like Kim Bowes who is also at Penn – develop more refined techniques and a growing interest in life in the countryside, Grey’s excavation of textual sources represents valuable complement (and surely at times a challenge) to a view of the ancient countryside fixated on postholes and pot sherds.  

A Paper on Corinthian Peasants

As regular readers of this blog know, David Pettegrew and I have been working on a paper about peasants in the Corinthian countryside for a joint APA/AIA panel at this years annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA.

Here’s the panel and the details:

Session 5J:
Joint AIA/APA Colloquium: Finding Peasants in Mediterranean Landscapes: New Work in Archaeology and History
1:30 p.m.−4:00 p.m.          
Independence Ballroom
Organizers: Cam Grey, University of Pennsylvania, and Kim Bowes, University of Pennsylvania

1:30 introduction (10 min.)
1:40 Producing the Peasant in the Corinthian Countryside 
David K. Pettegrew, Messiah College, and William Caraher, University of North Dakota (20 min.)
2:05 Placing the Peasant in Classical Athens
Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge (20 min.)
2:30 Not Your Run-of-the-Mill Cereal Farmer? The Evidence from Small Rural Settlements in the Cecina valley in Northern Etruria 
Nicola Terrenato, University of Michigan, and Laura Motta, University of Michigan (20 min.)
2:50 Break (15 min.)
3:05 Stuffed or Starved? Evaluating Models of Roman Peasantries
Robert Witcher, University of Durham (20 min.)
3:30 Excavating the Roman Peasant
Kim Bowes, University of Pennsylvania (20 min.)

And here’s the paper:

Crossposted to Corinthian Matters

Even More on Peasants

I finally got a copy of “Excavating the Roman Peasant I: Excavations at Pievina (GR)” by M Ghisleni, . Vaccaro, and Kim Bowes in the Papers of the British School at Rome (79 (2011), 91-145). I am co-authoring a paper on peasants on a panel this January co-chaired by Kim Bowes, so my co-author and I, David Pettegrew, thought that this article might give us valuable insight into the central questions that Mediterranean archaeologists are asking about peasants.

This paper documents their preliminary excavations at a rural site represented on the surface by a low density scatter of pottery. This excavation was part of a larger project designed to document site that could be associated with peasants in the Italian countryside. Their argument is that survey archaeology has not produced particularly robust assemblages of material from rural sites making it difficult to make arguments for chronology or function at site potentially related to peasant producers. By excavating a sample of rural site identified through survey, this team hopes to establish a closer relationship between surface scatters and subsurface remains, a clearer picture of the smallest class of rural settlement (< .5 ha), and an understanding of peasant life in the Mediterranean basin.

This is a long and substantial article, so I am only going touch on some main points. The most interesting point from the perspective of a survey archaeologist is that their excavation of a low density (“off site”) scatter did produce a rural activity area. While the excavators do not provide a figure for artifact density on the surface, they did note that the scatter was predominantly 1st century BC to 1st century AD. The confirmation that a low density, offsite scatter could produce a substantial rural site fits well with David Pettegrew’s arguments from way back in 2001 where he argued that contingent practices associated with rural settlement are apt to produce only ephemeral traces in surface assemblages. He goes on to suggest that we should look beyond mono-causal arguments for off site scatters (like manuring) and recognize that the surface assemblage most likely represented a wide range of relatively short term activities, diverse depositional practices, and site life-cycles.

The structures revealed at Pievina produced just that kind of site. They revealed a number of structures ranging from a kiln probably for tile production, a cistern, a possible granary, what might be the remains of a Late Antique house and a small “rubbish tip”. The kiln, granary, and cistern were probably almost contemporary and they enjoyed a rather short period of use. The kiln, granary, and cistern appear to have been buried by a “localized, but significant colluvial event, probably a landslide”.   The site appears to have been abandoned between the 2nd and 3rd centuries only to see renewed activity in the 4th century A.D. At this time it seems to have been the site of a short lived Late Roman house.

It is interesting that the same site sees renewed activity after two centuries of abandonment, and it speaks both to issues of historical memory and issues of persistent, productive places in the landscape. The relatively short periods of occupation at the site invite us to consider an ancient countryside made of short-lived, relatively low investment places that blink on and off when opportunity for gain present themselves. This fits will with recent interpretations of the peasant economy which have tended to see peasants as dynamic figures in the ancient countryside continuously modifying their practices to manage risk, take advantage of opportunities, and survive amidst the contingencies of history.

On other thing to mention briefly about the methods and procedures used by this team in excavating these rural sites. They make it clear that they employed techniques derived from CRM (Cultural Resource Management) practices to expedite the excavation and documentation of their sites. This included the use of earthmoving equipment to remove topsoil, minimal use of hand drawn plans, kite photography (which presumably served as the basis for their digital plans), and other “short cuts” that allowed them to excavate quickly while documenting at a satisfactory level of detail for their research questions. They also backfilled at the end of the season. As someone who is planning to excavate a relatively uncomplicated site this summer, their compromise between professional and academic practices is thought provoking. Archaeologists focused on rural sites should maybe learn from the people whose remains they excavate: come in with flexible tools, make minimal permanent investment, and leave little trace after you complete the project.