Classical studies professor Kimberly Bowes researches the working poor and the economies of their lives 2,000 years ago.
Kimberly Bowes, archaeologist, classical studies professor, and director of the Integrated Studies Program, focuses not on the elite during the Roman Empire, but on the lived experience of the working poor and the economies that dominated their lives. Bowes has received both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to expand her research.
The elite class living in the Roman Empire has attracted most of the attention by historians and archeologists of the period, which started with the famous Emperor Augustus in the first century and lasted nearly 500 years, says archaeologist Kimberly Bowes, University of Pennsylvania professor of classical studies. Her research focuses instead on the other 90 percent, on the lived experience of the working poor and the economies that dominated their lives.
The volumes are the product of a six-year archaeological project which examined the spaces, architecture, diet, agriculture, market interactions, and movement of rural dwellers in a region of southern Tuscany during the Roman period.
The project was a team effort, together with fellow Penn professor Cam Grey and a group of Italian and European colleagues. The project’s discoveries sparked her “transformation as a scholar,” to focus more on economic history, Bowes says, although she continues to work on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman world.
Teaching provided another transformative moment, as Bowes worked with Petra Todd, a Penn economics professor, team-teaching an integrated studies class with her in 2019. Todd’s statistical analyses on the success of modern poverty programs, particularly concerning the rural poor, resonated with Bowes and her studies of the ancient period, she says.
Bowes’ Guggenheim project represents an expansion of this work, from peasants to the whole of the working poor. Her new book, tentatively titled “Getting by Under the Roman Empire: An Economic History of the 90%,” will look at the opportunities and stresses experienced by working people through research studies at the household level.
“Integrating the working majority into our histories of the ancient world decenters what has been an elite, male-centered vision of that world, with implications for what this means for us today,” Bowes says. “These people are part and parcel of the general Roman economy. They don't live in some separate space: they participated in every way. One could argue, as far as the Roman world is one of the first global economies, they're the ones producing it.”
Penn Today spoke with Bowes about her research and the books that detail the discoveries.
Roman history and Roman archeology are largely written about the elites. My own work up until this point was about rich people’s houses and rich people's religious experiences. I kept putting these footnotes in my books that said: ‘This only applies to 10% of the population.’ If there’s anyone who can unearth the 90%, it’s archeologists. Why haven’t we actually gone out to try to find the majority of the population? There had never been a project that set out to say, ‘Let’s see what we can find out about 90% of the population,’ which in the ancient world are small farmers. I’m always talking about both history and archeology. How would they look different if told from below?
How did the six years of excavations progress?
No one had ever really done a project like this before, so there were some big question marks as to whether we would find anything. In a way we spent four years digging in the wrong place, to quote a line from Indiana Jones. We assumed these tiny scatters were houses because we modern people think about houses, but, in fact, they're not houses. They’re all these other productive installations, places where farmers do stuff. They press their olives or grapes. They keep their animals inside in bad weather. They make ceramics. They modify their landscapes in lots of ways. Some were big, some were small, but none was a house. What we found instead was a landscape in which every single square inch was being used for very specific purpose and being made to produce in a kind of maximizing way. It really turns on its head a lot of assumptions about small farmers: that they live in one place, that their lives don’t change, that they are inherently conservative.
What new insights about Roman farmers did you discover?
That Roman peasants are totally integrated into their economic world; they are mobile, consuming, maximizers. They have a base house, and then they move around the landscape all the time, doing different things in different places. They buy most of the things that they need. They’re clearly participating in a monetized economy. We kept finding evidence that these are people who are really hooked into that very big globalized economy of the Roman world. At the same time, they’re small rural farmers, and they live insistently and very precisely and with huge knowledge of their little specific landscapes: They know every square inch, and they know what it can do. These people almost certainly have little pieces of land that are scattered all over the place in a Mediterranean landscape, which is super diverse; this is the best way to make the land produce. We found lots of evidence for that, which was super exciting.
What did you learn about their farming practices?
We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand how these people made the land produce. We found them making really intensive and quite sophisticated use of the land, particularly controlling water, in ways that also we would never have predicted.
This is where the project also broke new ground; we did a lot of work on the environmental or biological remains. We studied pollen. It actually settles into the earth and forms part of the units that we excavate, and there are ways of extracting it and studying it. We were able through the pollen to understand what plants were growing nearby. This is how we figured out that they’re practicing what’s called tripartite crop rotation or lay agriculture: One year you’re producing grain, and the next year you’re producing nitrogen-fixing legumes, ideally fodder you can feed your animals, and then you’re continuing to grow your animals as they graze in the third rotation, which is pasture. So, you’re tripling its productive use. The land is being used in this incredibly efficient way. The sophistication is not what had been assumed of these people. This is all extremely exciting, too.
How did animals figure into these farming practices?
Animals are silent participants in Roman agriculture that nobody really thought about. Previously historians held a kind of extreme vision of the poverty of Roman peasants, that they were all vegetarians because they couldn’t afford to eat meat or have access to animals for work. like plowing. Instead, we could see in that sequence of crop decisions, all of the cycles require animals. You need them to plow these really heavy soils, you’re feeding them fodder that you’ve just grown, and they’re grazing the pasture cycle and through manure putting nutrients back into the soil. We also found peasants eating a good amount of meat, the same kind rich people eat, namely lots of pork, along with beef and lamb. So, animals were important for agriculture, and they were an important part of peasant diet.
What is the impact of your discoveries today?
Sustainable manipulation of the environment, particularly water, is important. The fact that these people made such precise, maximal use of every environmental advantage is pertinent to small farmers today. Modern, small farmers tend to have a whole series of problems, but one of the biggest is they have tiny, singular plots that are really restricted in area. These people in ancient Rome use tiny plots but spread out over different mini-econosystems and were usable to reduce risk effectively, while producing small surpluses that they could sell. They were improving the quality of their soils by manuring and rotation and by moving rainwater around, not just irrigation. These are sustainable, risk-reducing micromanagerial approaches to small plots, but they require that farmers can move and have access to multiple kinds of land. Modern small holders, especially in Central and South America, don’t have this kind of land access.
Are researchers becoming more interested in studying the regular folks during the Roman Empire?
I think the tide is turning. I think that there’s an understanding that, although it’s easier to talk about elites because we have lots of evidence, we have to push back against that and start to tell the harder stories that actually reflect the majority of the population.
The Guggenheim project has to do with the economic history of the working poor generally. If Roman peasants were as innovative as we’ve found, what about everyone else? What kind of strategies did potters and metalworkers and traders and textile workers use to get by? How did the huge number of enslaved and freed people intersect with the economic lives of the free? We actually have the accounts kept by all these kinds of people—expense lists and contracts—as well as the archaeology of their lives. I’m hoping to weave all this together to understand how people spent and saved, how they combined different jobs, like farming and occasional wage labor, for instance, to make a living.
Cam Grey is an associate professor of classical studies in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.
Petra Todd is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economicsin Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences and a research associate of the Population Studies Center.
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