Colonial landscapes : demography, settlement organization and impact of colonies founded by Rome (4th-2nd centuries BC)
Pelgrom, J.
Citation
Pelgrom, J. (2012, January 12). Colonial landscapes : demography, settlement organization and impact of colonies founded by Rome (4th-2nd centuries BC). Retrieved from
https://hdl.handle.net/1887/18335
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Colonial Landscapes
Demography, Settlement Organization and Impact of Colonies founded by Rome (4th- 2nd centuries BC)
Proefschrift ter verkrijging van
de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden
op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P. F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties
te verdedigen op 12 januari 2012
klokke 13:45 uur door Jeremia Pelgrom geboren te Maastricht
in 1975
Promotor: Prof. dr. L. de Ligt
Other committee members: Prof. dr. P. A. J. Attema (Groningen University) Prof. dr. J. L. Bintliff
Dr. G. J. Bradley (Cardiff University) Prof. dr. P. C. M. Hoppenbrouwers Dr. L. E. Tacoma
Prof. dr. D. G. Yntema (VU University Amsterdam)
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present study was part of the broader research programme ‘Peasants, citizens, and soldiers: the effects of demographic growth in Roman Republican Italy (202-88 BC)’ carried out from 2004-2009 at Leiden University. This programme was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). I received additional funding from the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) and from the Leiden University Fund (LUF).
It is a pleasure to thank the many people who made this thesis possible. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Luuk de Ligt for his numerous and very constructive comments and for the good atmosphere of academic interaction. Especially our weekly lunch sessions have been enormously stimulating and enjoyable. My special thanks go also to the other members of the Leiden VICI-project:
Paul Erdkamp, Simon Northwood, Saskia Hin, Saskia Roselaar and Rens Tacoma. It is hard to overstate how much I benefited from their expertise, their comments on several chapters of this book and from their friendship. I am grateful to Jonh Bintliff for his valuable critical comments on my thesis and for bringing many landscape archaeologists together during the many survey workshops he organized. I also want to express my gratitude to Rosemary Robson for revising my English and to Annemarieke Willemsen for the motivating and above all pleasant lunches we shared and for all the wonderful books she gave me or helped me to get hold of.
I thank my colleagues at the VU University Amsterdam and Radboud University Nijmegen for their support and good companionship. In particular, I wish to thank Ton Derks for the stimulating courses we taught together and for the inspiring discussions on Roman archaeology and archaeological theory. Douwe Yntema who always found some time in his busy agenda to discuss Italian archaeology with me and who has kindly provided me with many relevant and difficult to come by publications. Jaap Fokkema en Bert Brouwenstijn for helping me with the distribution maps and images and for the very pleasant and often humorous conversations. I also thank my students, especially those who have followed the Roman colonization course, for their refreshing outlooks and their sharp analyses.
I profited greatly from the expertise of my Dutch colleagues working in Roman colonial areas in Italy. I thank Peter Attema, Tymon de Haas and Marijke Gnade who have provided me with very useful insiders information and who have commented on several chapters of my manuscript. I gained important insights during the ESF Workshop on Roman Republican colonization held in 2010 at Ravenstein. I thank all the participants for their feedback, their excellent papers and stimulating discussions. I owe a special thanks to Michel Tarpin and Michael Crawford who kindly shared their expert knowledge on the epigraphy of Latin colonies with me. Also, I should like to express my gratitude to the participants of the
SLP field survey campaigns. Not in the least place Jitte Waagen. His expertise in GIS, but above all our long-lasting friendship have made these and many other fieldwork projects in Italy unforgettable experiences.
Two persons deserve a special thanks for their crucial roles in my academic career. First of all, Gert-Jan Burgers who has taught me virtually everything I know about Italian landscape archaeology.
Without his continuous support, inspiring enthusiasm, sharp insights and genuine love and concern for archaeology and heritage issues I certainly would not have been in the position to pursue a career as an academic archaeologist. Since our encounter at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome in 2003 Tesse Stek has been an invaluable colleague and friend. Our adventurous travels, the continuous fruitful discussions, his constructive comments on virtually all the texts I have written and the several fieldwork campaigns we organized together, are only but a few examples of the value of his comradeship and of the important influence he has had on this dissertation and on my other research activities.
Finally, I thank my family and my friends. In particular, Jeroen Kinsbergen for his friendship and the vitally important relaxing weeks in France; Bas Kinsbergen who always found the time to help me out, who advised me on the lay-out of this book and who has designed the cover; Chaïm van der Zant for our Wednesday-evening discussions; Fons van der Staak for his original observations and for the nostalgic LP-session; Judith Pelgrom for being the best sister anyone can wish for and for her impressive and very helpful organizational skills; Jaëlah van der Zant, my wife, for her warmth, her continual support and for being the beautiful person she is. A special thanks to Mirella Mattarei, my mother and coach, for her never-ending support and love. I will never forget the trips we made in Italy. I dedicate this book to her and to my father Daniël Willem Pelgrom.
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CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Roman colonization: a rough outline of the debate and the aim of this book 1.2. Conventional models
1.2.1. The colony as an imperial landscape 1.2.2. The peasant republic
1.3. Deconstruction and revision 1.3.1. Historiographical issues
1.3.2. Archaeology and the Gellian model
2. THE DEMOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Text-based demographic estimates 2.2.1. Livy’s figures
2.2.2. Competing traditions?
2.2.3. Compatible traditions 2.2.4. Who are the adscripti?
2.2.5. Livy’s numbers and Roman manpower 2.2.6. Areas of viritane settlement
2.2.7. Summarizing
2.3. Translating Livy’s figures into rural population densities 2.3.1. Population density
2.3.2. The percentage of Livy’s colonists who could have fitted inside the colonial oppida
2.3.3. Proportional differences between population and size of oppida in Latin and citizen colonies
2.4. Dots and colonists: the problem of the missing sites
2.4.1. The results from traditional, site-orientated field surveys 2.4.2. Methodological bias: the results from intensive off-site surveys 2.4.3. Conceptual bias: the model of dispersed settlement
2.4.4. Drawing up the balance
1
1 4 4 12 15 15 18 21
21 22 22 24 26 29 33 37 42 42 42 53 62
63 64 70 74 81
3. DIVIDED LANDSCAPES?
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Problems with the early references to distribution of small allotments 3.3. Explaining the gap: land distribution between the Latin War and Dentatus 3.4. The evidence of division lines
3.4.1. A rough outline of the debate
3.4.2. Land division in the Pontine marshes: the earliest example of centuriation?
3.4.3. Parallel division lines in early viritane territories
3.4.4. Parallel division lines in the territories of maritime and Latin colonies 3.4.5. First conclusions: land division systems in the fourth century
3.4.6. Orthogonal grids in colonial landscapes of the third century 3.5. Conclusion
4. SETTLEMENT ORGANIZATION
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Clustered or nucleated settlement patterns
4.3. Scattered landscapes of pre-Roman origin with evidence for nucleation
4.4. Alignment alongside watercourses, roads or settlement in specific geomorphologic zones
4.5. Landscapes of scattered settlement 4.6. Conclusions
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83 86 91 96 96 99 105 111 117 120 128 129
129 131 141
146 149 151
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5. TERRITORIAL JURISDICTION AND THE FATE OF THE INDIGENOUS POPULATION
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Indigenous inhabitants as coloni adscripti 5.3. Living apart together
5.3.1. Possible evidence of double communities in early Roman colonial contexts 5.3.2. The situation in the coloniae civium Romanorum
5.3.3. Some preliminary observations 5.4. What about the Latin colonies?
5.4.1. Separate communities, separate cities?
5.5. Reconciling the evidence
6. CONCLUSIONS
Appendices Bibliography
153
153 155 159 162 163 171 174 180 186 189 199 219
