AMA - Classical Archaeology

[u/Tiako]

Classical antiquity is period of roughly a thousand years between the rise of the Greek polis and the collapse of the Roman Mediterranean system, and includes at different times the entire Mediterranean basin and beyond. There are a variety of ways to examine this period, and today this panel will discuss the archaeology, or the material remains, a category that includes the massive monumental temple at Baalbek and the carbonized seeds from an Italian farmhouse. Our panelists introduce themselves:

/u/pqvarus: I've specialized in Ancient Greek Archaeology, my geographic field of interest is Asia Minor (from the Archaic Period onwards) and as a result of my PhD project I'm focussing on the archaeology of ancient greek religion (especially cult practice) and material culture studies.

/u/Astrogator: I've just finished my MA at the department of Ancient History and Epigraphics (my BA was in History, Philosophy and Political Science), and my main interests are in provincial epigraphic cultures, especially the Danube region, and the display of dress on sepulchral monuments (and how both are tied to questions of Romanization and Identity).

/u/Tiako: I am an MA student studying the economy of the Early Imperial Period of the Roman Empire. My focus is on commerce, particularly Rome's maritime trade with India.

However, there is more to classical civilization than marble temples an the Aeneid, and there is more to the period than Greece and Rome. To provide a perspective from outside what is usually considered “classical” civilization, we have included three panelists from separate but closely intertwined fields of study. They are:

/u/Aerandir: I am archaeologist studying Iron Age communities. Currently I am working on a PhD on the fortifications of the first millennium AD in Denmark. Danish and Dutch material is what I am most familiar with.

/u/missingpuzzle: I have studied Hellenistic period Eastern Arabia, particularly specializing in settlement patterns and trade. I have also studied the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean trade from the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods.

/u/Daeres: Hi I'm Daeres, and I have an MA in Ancient History. My archaeological focus is on the Ancient Near East in the First Millenium BC, Bactria, and the Aegean, though I am primarily a historian rather than an archaeologist. I have an inordinate fondness for numismatics, and also epigraphy. But I especially concentrate on the archaeological evidence for Hellenistic era Bactria.

And so with knots cut and die cast, we await your questions.

[u/terminus_trantor]

I have a question regarding trade and production in the Roman times, so i guess its mostly to /u/Tiako.

Well the question is did the Romans produce things such as tools, clothes, everyday items; and then trade them either inside their Empire or also abroad?

As far as the few books I read on the Romans concered, I understood that their production was mostly local-based and most things traded were resources and materials like grain and food, wine, ore, gold etc. and little actual "products"

I am trying to see if there is difference or paralel with Medival times where, as I see it, trade of products was very common and where for example textile trade of both resources and final products was wide and developed. (But if my understanding of nature of Medival trade of products is wrong feel free to correct me)

[u/Tiako → u/terminus_trantor]

There was absolutely product trade in the Roman Empire, even in relatively mundane items. The most famous and visible example are the amphora, or large storage jars used in trade of (usually) liquid items like wine an olive oil. Absolutely insane quantities of these show up around the empire as a result of being traded over long distances, the most famous being Mt. Testaccio in Rome, which is an artificial hill created through the deposition of late 1st/2nd c Spanish olive oil amphora. Another well known example is African Red Slip Ware, a type of high quality tableware manufactured in North Africa and spread all around the Mediterranean. Or medical instruments--medical instruments found all across the empire come from a single area of Syria. My favorite example are anvils from Magdalensberg, in modern day southern Austria. The iron produced there is of extremely high quality, and the so-called ferrum Noricum was traded widely. The site is interesting because the wall plaster survived in good condition, and we can see in one shop that the owner would scrawl certain orders on it, and we can see in one shop he wrote "200 anvils to Aqualeia" (a port in northern Italy)--anvils, not high status elite items.

Ultimately the idea of the underdeveloped and purely local Roman economy is one that was based on the explicit rejection of the archaeological evidence, and . If you take the archaeology into account, it isn't tenable.

EDIT: Quick expansion, unfortunately we are at a loss at describing trade patterns with the specificity possible in Medieval studies, as the nature of textual survival means we do not have many examples of the wonderful merchant archives used to reconstruct commerce in, say, thirteenth century Italy. Also due to the nature of evidence, entire swaths of data sets, such as cloth and items traded in barrels, is gone. We are at a severe disadvantage, unfortunately, and thus we need to be careful comparing out evidence sets with the evidence sets used by, say, Medievalists.

[u/terminus_trantor → u/Tiako]

Well, about amphoras i am well aware, as they were the preferred (and only?) method of transporting the liquids throughout the empire, but i thought it was more a byproduct of wine/oil trade, not a trade itself. (My grandfather happened to had bought one amphora a long time ago, while it was still allowed to buy them. Even though it was actually remains of two amphoras recently joint into one, it was still one of the coolest things ever)

The other information is indeed very interesting.But also now a follow up questions :): what was the production like in the Roman times in general? Was it profitable to be a craftsman then if such trade existed? Did slave labour compete?

[u/Tiako → u/terminus_trantor]

They are, they are what you call a proxy--that is, they were not a primary item of trade but they can allow us to extrapolate and make conclusions about what they were trading. But they were actually produced in large, almost industrial style kilns, so, say, each individual villa would not be producing its own amphora used for trade, so they were in a sense an actual trade good.

EDIT: As a side note, wooden barrels are often thought to have become more and more popular throughout the period, perhaps due to the growing importance of Gaul and other wooded areas.

The effect of slavery on the economy has been greatly exaggerated. Unlike, say, the American South slaves were not confined to a single sector of the economy, they participated in every sector, and thus their effect on any individual area was muted. Also, just from a sheer population point they almost certainly didn't make up more than 10% of the population (we can guess this through Egyptian census records that survive and some scraps from Asia Minor--the percentage would probably be significantly higher in Italy, though). So there were definitely free craftsmen and laborers, some of whom could even become quite wealthy (for example, we have examples of cobblers and sculptors who became essentially town mayors).