A companion to ancient agriculture / [edited by] David Hollander, Iowa State University, Iowa, USA, Timothy Howe, St. Olaf College, Minnesota, USA.

Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021.

©2021

xviii, 717 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.

"In 1970, introducing his Roman Farming, K.D. White justly lamented the lack of attention being paid to Greco-Roman agriculture. Nearly fifty years later, he would presumably be quite pleased with how the field has developed. Beginning in the 1970s (and no doubt in part due to White's own work) there has been steady growth in the number of monographs and articles on aspects of Greek and Roman agriculture as well as new commentaries on, and translations of, the most important ancient texts. Furthermore, instead of a largely text-driven approach, ancient agricultural history now employs an array of archaeological evidence (e.g., botanical and faunal remains) and methodologies (e.g., field survey, isotopic analysis). Students of the agricultural history of ancient Italy, to cite one regional example, now have new editions, translations, and commentaries on the fundamental literary texts (e.g., Goujard 1975 for Cato's De agricultura and Heurgon 1978 on Varro's Res rusticae), monographs, edited volumes, and articles putting those writers' works and lives into the broader context of Republican history (e.g., Reay 2005 and many of the chapters in Becker and Terrenato 2012) and literature (e.g., Kronenberg 2009). Archaeologists have published the results of fields surveys, new excavations of rural sites (including exciting recent work on small, non-elite sites by the Roman Peasant Project, Ghisleni et al. 2011), a synthesis of the survey data (Laurano 2011), a catalogue of the villas in central Italy (Marzano 2007), and important overviews (e.g., Forni and Marcone 2002). In the Greek world, archaeological survey in particular has spawned a generation of multidiciplinary studies on the interactions between lanscape and people, between rural and urban (Halstead and Frederick 2000; Adam-Veleni, Poulaki and Tzanavari 2003; Alcock and Cherry 2004; Bresson 2016). What accounts for this astonishing development in what many outsiders probably regard as a fairly dry subject? Undoubtedly one cause is the increased interest in the ancient economy. Since ancient economies were overwhelmingly agricultural, the farming sector demands serious attention. Environmental and demographic research as well as growing interest in foodways have also prompted more work on rural life in antiquity. Efforts to better estimate the population of Roman Italy have led, for example, to interest in the land's carrying capacity and thus more attention to issues of agricultural yields (on modeling Roman production, see Goodchild 2013; for Seleukid Mesopotamia, see Jursa 2010). The need to take stock of all these developments inspired us to develop this Companion which we hope offers an entrée into a field now so rich in research as to be perhaps somewhat intimidating"-- Provided by publisher.

Online version: Hollander, David B. (David Bruce) A companion to ancient agriculture First edition. Hoboken : Wiley, 2019.

English

February 18, 2021

Includes bibliographical references and index.