The economy of Roman wine. Productive landscapes, archaeological data, quantification and modelling
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-27

The study of the Roman viticulture economy has multiple fields of knowledge and expertise with enormous possibilities for research. Most studies have in common to use the archaeological information and the written sources as a complementary support to confirm the absolute chronology of a settlement, a socio-economic phenomenon or an exact location of a wine production centre or a pottery activity in a specific territory.
Regional variability is a key point for understanding the changing patterns of rural settlement and its evolution as the specific interaction between intra-regional and extra-regional economic networks. These studies can be conducted by geospatial and geoeconomic analyses in different territorial levels: macroespacial (regio) mesoespacial (territorium) and microespacial (torcularium atque figlina).
The level of dependence of the rural population in the regional market, respect for local urban centers and their subsequent screening in foreign markets (in our case study research: Western Europe, Italian Peninsula and Rome itself), responding to a series of socioeconomic patterns and behaviors that may be modeled and studied by different economic and econometrical ways.
The extensive use of mathematical models, statistical and linear programming to analyze, interpret and make predictions/regressions and reconstructions on the evolution of those complex systems, regarding, inter alia, different variables as the potential production of a region or territory, the regional consumption, the surplus production that could be traded in foreign markets, and other variables such as the sale prices, the market reactions, the production and transport costs, and the trends of consumption, is an increasingly widespread reality.
This paper present a PhD Research Project that try to analyse in four scenarios, the answers to this questions and the evolution of this complex economic system, related with the production processes, the long-distance trade and the consumption of Laeetanian wine in the Roman period, between the 1st century BC and the 3th century AD.

Antoni Martin Oliveras, University of Barcelona