Peasants and slaves. The rural population of Roman Italy (II c. BC - I c. AD)

Studies like Hannibal’s Legacy by Arnold Toynbee (1965) and Italian Manpower by Peter A. Brunt (1971) developed a specific interpretive model which accounted for the overall transformations of Roman politics, economy and society in Italy. Indeed, it was argued that something had irreversibly changed in the relationship between the citizen-peasant-soldier and his landscape. Laying at the forefront of this interpretation was the idea of a decline of the Italian free peasantry (being supplanted by imported slaves), that is a formal demographic argument whose origin can be traced back to Karl Julius Beloch’s Bevölkerung (1886). However, such readings were not universally accepted and have been increasingly debated among scholars of the ancient economy, arguing for or against traditional explanations of what happened to the countryside of Late Republican Italy. To what a degree the contribution of archaeological survey to this debate could be fruitful (or even appropriate) is a matter of debate in itself, but it is equally undeniable that surface scatters of potsherds from all over Italy have produced a huge amount of data related to ancient settlement patterns, from time to time being interpreted as an argument for the persistence of the Italian free peasantry. Accordingly, this research aims at developing a formal synthesis of archaeological (survey-derived) evidence to be fully integrated within the traditional debate on the rural population of Roman Italy (II c. BC – I c. AD). It is a clear objective of this study to show that a deep permeation of archaeological and historical researching is not only desirable and profitable, but rather necessary, such interdisciplinary attitude being explicitly inherited from grand traditions within both Italian and British scholarship.