Tag: Archaeology in the Ancient World

Articles

The size of the economy and the distribution of income in the Roman Empire

Different ways of estimating the Gross Domestic Product of the Roman Empire in the second century CE produce convergent results that point to total output and consumption equivalent to 50 million tons of wheat or close to 20 billion sesterces per year. It is estimated that elites (around 1.5 per cent of the imperial population) controlled approximately one-fifth of total income while middling households (perhaps 10 percent of the population) consumed another fifth. These findings shed new light on the scale of economic inequality and the distribution of demand in the Roman world.

Articles

Disease and death in the ancient city of Rome

This paper surveys textual and physical evidence of disease and mortality in the city of Rome in the late republican and imperial periods. It emphasizes the significance of seasonal mortality data and the weaknesses of age at death records and paleodemographic analysis, considers the complex role of environmental features and public infrastructure, and highlights the very considerable promise of scientific study of skeletal evidence of stress and disease.

Articles

The collapse and regeneration of complex society in Greece, 1500-500 BC

Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best known examples of the phenomenon of the regeneration of complex society after a collapse. I review 10 core dimensions of this process (urbanism, tax and rent, monuments, elite power, information- recording systems, trade, crafts, military power, scale, and standards of living), and suggest that punctuated equilibrium models accommodate the data better than gradualist interpretations.

Articles

Texts, contexts, subtexts and interpretative frameworks. Beyond the parochial and toward (dynamic) modeling of the Ptolemaic state and the Ptolemaic economy

My concern in this paper is the historical interpretation of the Greek and demotic documentary papyri of the Ptolemaic period, the role of Archaeology in the context of Ptolemaic economic history, and the application of social science theory towards an understanding of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Articles

Farming in the ancient Greek world: how should the small free producers be defined?

The peasant is often defined as a small self-sufficient producer who employs family labour to work a mixed farm. Living in little rural communities and a specific tradi- tional culture constitute other aspects of his specific situation. Agrarian societies often present social differentiations and involve several rapports between cultivators and the landed gentry.

Articles

POMPEY’S POLITICS AND THE PRESENTATION OF HIS THEATRE-TEMPLE COMPLEX, 61–52 BCE

In spite of all this triumph Pompey also returned to Rome under unfavourable conditions. The majority of the senate did not respect the great general. He came from a recent noble family of late distinction, he did not rise through the ranks of the cursus honorum in the venerable Roman tradition, and he was not familiar with the protocol of the Roman senate…

Articles

THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF CURSE TABLETS [DEFIXIONES] IN BRITAIN AND ON THE CONTINENT

The tradition of writing curses on lead tablets appears to have originated in Greece, with the earliest examples having been discovered in Sicily, Olbia and Attica dated to the fifth century B.C., and by the second century AD they were being written throughout Western Europe, with this practice continuing throughout the Mediterranean until at least the sixth century A.D.