Abstract/Summary

The appearance and spread of villas both in Roman Italy and abroad has been at the centre of a vast range of studies on the Roman economy and society. From Marxist approaches, which saw in the Roman villa based on slave labour a unit denoting a particular type of agricultural exploitation to studies aimed at understanding how settlement hierarchy and modes of landownership changed over time, archaeological evidence from excavations and from field surveys has been central to the debate. In the past, the spread of large villas in Republican Italy has been seen as a phenomenon which displaced from the land small and medium landowners and thus contributed to Rome's socio-political problems from the time of the Gracchi onwards. Recent studies, however, have in fact stressed that large villas and farms were not at variance with each other. The productivity of peasant farmers and the level of competitiveness they had on the market has also been the object of important recent investigations and reassessments. Thus, a more organic evaluation of how the 'villa economy' and the 'peasant economy' operated and to what degree the two were integrated is necessary. This volume investigates these issues from a range of regional perspectives encompassing Roman Italy and several provincial territories. The methodological approaches and new archaeological data presented shed new light on the relationship between large villa estates and small farms.