Alessandro Launaro

Hidden histories of Roman towns: seeing beneath the surface of Falerii Novi and Interamna Lirenas

Issue 90 CurrentWorldArChAeology above Today, the site of Falerii Novi is dominated by the farm and church established in a former monastery. Under the fields lie the buried remnants of a Roman city founded in 241 BC. Although excavating the urban area would be prohibitive in terms of time and funding, ground-penetrating radar offers the key to understanding the relationship between these buried buildings. Hidden histories of Roman towns

Something old, something new: Social and economic developments in the countryside of Roman Italy between Republic and Empire

In his classic publication Hannibal’s Legacy, Toynbee wrote about the economic consequences of the deracination of the Italian peasantry which supposedly had both accompanied and followed the Hannibalic War. In his opinion new economic possibilities had potentially existed in the Italian peninsula since its political unification, though they had never really been exploited: “If an alternative economic system, or set of systems, were to present itself, and if the introduction of this promised to be profitable to the old Roman aristocracy or to the new commercial and industrial class whose fortunes had been made by the wars that had been the Italian peasantry’s ruin, this ruined and uprooted peasantry would no longer have the strength to protect and preserve its ancestral way of life”.1 Whatever the exact nature of the relationship Toynbee established between the outcome of the Second Punic War, rural free-population dynamics, the attitude of the landed aristocracy, and new productive/trade patterns, the interplay of these factors has kept many scholars occupied over the last fifty years.2 The aim of this contribution is to offer a critical discussion of more recent developments in our understanding of the social and economic transformations taking place within the countryside of Roman Italy in the period 200 BC to AD 100.