How central was Rome for its Hinterland?

Description

Rome and its surrounding region, often referred to as the Suburbium, are generally considered as highly integrated, but with a strong focus on the city of Rome itself: economically, with economic specialisation around Rome presumably taking place according to Von Thünen’s Isolated State model (Morley 1996); demographically, with high degrees of mobility between Rome and surrounding regions (Witcher 2005); and socio-politically, as surrounding territories were directly controlled by Rome while Roman elites retained spatially dispersed power bases (Terrenato 2019).
While this image of Urbs and Suburbium as one integrated urban system with a globalised countryside (Smith 2020) may by and large hold true, it is certainly also one-sided: based mainly on written and epigraphic sources, it very much focuses on Rome and its political and economic elites as agents of integration. Much less attention has been dedicated to the evidence from the Suburbium itself, which may offer a rather different perspective on the nature of this integration and its effects on the daily lives of rural non-elite. While both excavation and especially survey data are amply available for the rural landscapes around Rome, these data are still rather dispersed and have therefore so far not been approached synthetically from such a perspective.
Drawing on three major survey datasets that have recently been integrated within the Roman Hinterland Project, this paper aims to explore, from a rural perspective, how central Rome was for the surrounding Suburbium. By presenting several analyses of the integrated site and ceramic data, aspects of demographic developments, economic networks and consumption patterns in different parts of the Suburbium are explored in order assess how and to what extent rural communities were (more or less directly) affected by or dependent on the city of Rome.

Period	29-Aug-2024
Event title	EAA 30th meeting Rome
Event type	Conference
Location	RomeShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International