Feeding Roman Italy: Continuities and Innovations in animal production from urbanisation to empire

Objective

At the turn of the first millennium AD, Italy formed the heart of Europe’s first transcontinental empire, with Rome at its core. The social, economic, and demographic growth that enabled the emergence of early urban states and their aggregation into Roman hegemony was fuelled by dramatic increases in rural production. While abundant archaeological evidence illustrates changes in the peninsula’s productive landscape, and ancient texts offer a litany of elite opinions on best agronomic practice, current frameworks have yet to address how these major increases in output were achieved. This significant lacuna in our understanding of farming – the foundation of ancient society, an essential driver of growth, and the most important nexus between humans and their environment – is a major gap that impedes research in and beyond the rural landscape: a gap that this project will fill. FEROCI generates new direct evidence for agro-pastoral practice, using livestock as a lens to investigate surplus production, territorial integration, and land use across a dynamic period of urbanisation and political expansion (600 BC–AD 200). The project reconstructs herding regimes via biomolecular, zooarchaeological, and non-destructive high-resolution osteological analyses of the excavated remains of livestock, and then leverages this new corpus of data to quantitatively and spatially address the relationship between husbandry, settlement systems, and the environment. In doing so, FEROCI creates an entirely new line of evidence on rural praxis, and integrates it with the most active area of research on Italian agriculture – landscape dynamics – to effect a step change in understanding of the agro-pastoral systems at foundation of ancient society, and how shifts in their organisation shaped economic growth and territorial expansion from urbanisation to nascent empire.