Landscapes of commerce: a spatial approach to local market systems
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 12/11/2019

Understanding local-scale, rural marketing systems is a significant challenge for archaeology. In the Roman world, literary evidence suggests that small-scale farmers frequently brought their produce to nearby towns and disposed of it in commercial transactions, but it is difficult to study this type of economic exchange from traditional archaeological materials because both the goods being sold and the containers in which they were transported were usually perishable. The coins involved were often spent in the town. Spatial analysis offers a way forward. Rather than relying on proxies like urban-manufactured goods to indicate an economic relationship, spatial analysis relies on distance, a structural constraint that could never be completely avoided in any exchange. Peasants who went to market frequently would have tried to minimize the time they had to travel by living closer to the marketplace while those farther away would not have been able to visit as often. By analyzing the distance between rural settlements and various potential markets—while simultaneously taking into account other factors that influenced settlement location—it becomes possible to estimate how important marketing was to the people living in the countryside. By varying the types of places considered as markets we can determine which places attracted rural settlement. In this paper, I will analyze the settlement patterns along the Lower Rhine and Lower Danube frontiers to test the hypothesis that garrison settlements functioned as markets for local produce.

(Eli James Sheldon Weaverdyck)