Reframing the Roman Economy: New Perspectives on Habitual Economic Practices [Paperback]

This book focuses on those features of the Roman economy that are less traceable in text and archaeology, and as a consequence remain largely underexplored in contemporary scholarship. By reincorporating, for the first time, these long-obscured practices in mainstream scholarly discourses, this book offers a more complete and balanced view of an economic system that for too long has mostly been studied through its macro-economic and large-scale  and thus archaeologically and textually omnipresent  aspects. The topic is approached in five thematic sections, covering unusual actors and perspectives, unusual places of production, exigent landscapes of exploitation, less-visible products and artefacts, and divergent views on emblematic economic spheres. To this purpose, the book brings together a select group of leading scholars and promising early career researchers in archaeology and ancient economic history, well positioned to steer this ill-developed but fundamental field of the Roman economy in promising new directions.

Chapter 1: Pathways to reframing the Roman economy: from uniformity to diversity?.- Part I Unusual actors, attitudes and perspectives.- Chapter 2: Textile economy in the Veneto Region (North-Eastern Italy): a textile tools oriented spatial approach.- Chapter 3: Craftsmen and shopkeepers serving the army: the example of the colony of Lugdunum (1st century AD).- Part II Unconventional loci of production.- Chapter 5: Roman metallurgic production in the Veneto region between urban and rural contexts.- Chapter 6: Pigs in the city, bees on the roof: intra-urban animal husbandry and butchery in Roman Spain.- Chapter 7: Olive Oil Production and Economic Growth in the Roman Provinces: the Peculiar Case of Volubilis in Mauretania Tingitana.- Chapter 8: Roman road stations in Gallia Cisalpina: an archaeological approach to elusive central places.- Chapter 9: Ephemeral Economies? Investigating Roman wetland exploitation in the Pontine marshel³›