Urbanism and the division of labour in the Roman Empire

Mechanical stress in the urbanized Roman Phoenician coast

OBJECTIVE

Skeletal populations from Byblos, Beirut, and Tyre were studied to assess mechanical stress along the Roman Phoenician coast.

MATERIALS

The sample included 153 adult skeletons.

METHODS

Skeletal remains were macroscopically assessed for osteoarthritis, intervertebral disc disease (IDD), and Schmorl's nodes.

RESULTS

The Byblos population experienced higher levels of mechanical stress than the Beirut and Tyre ones. Sex-based differences were also found in all skeletal assemblages with males likely engaging in physically more demanding tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

The variation in mechanical stress, and associated physically demanding tasks, between these populations can be attributed to their differing political and economic status during the Roman period; textual sources highlight the economic and political dominance of Beirut and Tyre, emanating from their status as coloniae.

SIGNIFICANCE

This study represents one of the first attempts to investigate mechanical stress in coastal Phoenicia during the Roman period. It provides valuable insights into the biocultural structure of understudied communities at the periphery of the Roman world, and can serve as a basis for further future research into the occupational patterns of Phoenician communities.

LIMITATIONS

The contextual information for these skeletal populations is very limited and does not allow secure conclusions regarding their representativeness. The sample sizes are also rather small, especially when divided per sex and age.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Further investigation employing complementary methods such as cross-sectional geometric properties and entheseal changes is needed to reconstruct the occupational patterns of these communities, taking into account cultural, environmental, and temporal factors.

Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?

An evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI) occurs when a previously independent organism becomes a lower level unit within a higher hierarchical level (for example, cells in an organism, ants in a colony). Using archaeological and historical accounts from the last 12 000 years, I empirically examine the proposition that human society increasingly functions as a higher hierarchical level within which individuals integrate as lower level units. I evaluate human societal development with respect to three criteria that together indicate complexity in biological systems and serve as an operationalization scheme for ETIs: size, inseparability and specialization. The size of the largest polity has increased seven orders of magnitude, from hundreds to billions. Inseparability became nearly complete since Mesopotamian city-states, following the first appearance of intricate specialization (division of labour). Connectivity within a polity has increased rapidly during the last few centuries, and particularly within the last few decades. In view of these results, I formulate the following hypothesis: human society is undergoing an evolutionary transition in individuality, driven by socio-cultural-technological processes. This proposition requires a detailed theoretical basis and further empirical testing. I propose four predictions derived from the hypothesis that may be used to test it. This article is part of the theme issue 'Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions'.

Food security in Roman Palmyra (Syria) in light of paleoclimatological evidence and its historical implications

Food security in ancient urban centers is often discussed but rarely formally modelled. Despite its location in an inhospitable desert where food production is a constant challenge ancient Palmyra grew from a small oasis settlement in to a major geopolitical player. Here, we present a spatially explicit reconstruction of the land use and agricultural yield expectations of its hinterland determining the maximum feasible population of the city. Coupling the hinterland carrying capacity model with palaeoclimatic data allowed us to track changes in the food security of the city in the face of changing climate. While initially the hinterland could provide ample food resources for the small settlement with time the deteriorating climate conditions after the Roman Optimum (100 BCE-200 CE) collided with rapidly growing population of the city. The nexus of these two processes fall at mid third century–a period of profound changes in the structure of Palmyrene society, its geopolitical situation and its historical trajectory. The results point to increasingly precarious subsistence levels as a likely factor behind rapid militarization, shift towards an autocratic regime and military expansion of the city in the late third century CE. As a well-established causal mechanism in many modern conflicts and crises, food security is also a potential causal factor behind historical events, if a hard one to prove due to the difficulty of identifying relevant data patterns. The methods presented establishes a robust research pipeline that can be used on other ancient urban centers, contributing to the construction of an empirically supported model of how food security shaped human history, past and present.

Division of labor, specialization and diversity in the ancient Roman cities: A quantitative approach to Latin epigraphy

Recent empirical studies on the division of labor in modern cities indicate a complex web of relationships between sectoral specialization of cities and their productivity on one hand and sectoral diversification and resilience on the other. Emerging scholarly consensus suggests that ancient urbanism has more in common with modern urban development than previously thought. We explore whether modern trends in urban division of labor apply to the cities of the Western Roman Empire from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE. We analyze occupational data extracted from a large body of Latin epigraphic evidence by computer-assisted text-mining, subsequently mapped onto a dataset of ancient Roman cities. We detect a higher frequency of occupation terms on inscriptions from cities led by Rome than from rural areas and identify an accumulation of tertiary sector occupations in large cities. The temporal dimension of epigraphic data allows us to study aspects of the division of labor diachronically and to detect trends in the data in a four centuries-long period of Roman imperial history. Our analyses reveal an overall decrease in the frequency of occupational terms between the first half and second half of the third century CE; the maximum frequency of occupational terms shifts over time from large cities to medium and small towns, and finally, rural areas. Our results regarding the specialization and diversity of cities and their respective impact on productivity and resilience remain inconclusive, possibly as a result of the socio-economic bias of Latin inscriptions and insufficient representativeness of the data. Yet, we believe that our formalized approach to the research problem opens up new avenues for research, both in respect to the economic history of the Roman Empire and to the current trends in the science of cities.

The structure, centrality, and scale of urban street networks: Cases from Pre-Industrial Afro-Eurasia

Cities and towns have often developed infrastructure that enabled a variety of socio-economic interactions. Street networks within these urban settings provide key access to resources, neighborhoods, and cultural facilities. Studies on settlement scaling have also demonstrated that a variety of urban infrastructure and resources indicate clear population scaling relationships in both modern and ancient settings. This article presents an approach that investigates past street network centrality and its relationship to population scaling in urban contexts. Centrality results are compared statistically among different urban settings, which are categorized as orthogonal (i.e., planned) or self-organizing (i.e., organic) urban settings, with places having both characteristics classified as hybrid. Results demonstrate that street nodes have a power law relationship to urban area, where the number of nodes increases and node density decreases in a sub-linear manner for larger sites. Most median centrality values decrease in a negative sub-linear manner as sites are larger, with organic and hybrid urban sites’ centrality being generally less and diminishing more rapidly than orthogonal settings. Diminishing centrality shows comparability to modern urban systems, where larger urban districts may restrict overall interaction due to increasing transport costs over wider areas. Centrality results indicate that scaling results have multiples of approximately ⅙ or ⅓ that are comparable to other urban and road infrastructure, suggesting a potential relationship between different infrastructure features and population in urban centers. The results have implications for archaeological settlements where urban street plans are incomplete or undetermined, as it allows forecasts to be made on past urban sites’ street network centrality. Additionally, a tool to enable analysis of street networks and centrality is provided as part of the contribution.

A quantitative analysis of intensification in the ethnographic record

The intensification of food production plays a central role in the evolution of complex human societies. However, it is unclear whether the standard model of intensification is theoretically or empirically justified. This leaves social scientists unable to make reasonable inferences about the relationship between intensification and the evolution of social complexity in past societies. To remedy this problem, I derive a model of intensification from human macroecology, settlement scaling theory, human behavioural ecology, cultural evolutionary theory and niche construction theory. The standard and cultural niche construction models are formalized and their predictions are tested using a comprehensive ethnographic dataset that describes food production in 40 human societies, ranging in complexity from foraging bands to agricultural states. Analysis of the ethnographic record suggests that we reject the standard model and tentatively accept the cultural niche construction model. I attempt to demonstrate the broader utility of the cultural niche construction model as a framework that may help explain the transition from small-scale to large-scale complex societies.

Tableware trade in the Roman East: Exploring cultural and economic transmission with agent-based modelling and approximate Bayesian computation

The availability of reliable commercial information is considered a key feature of inter-regional trade if the Roman economy was highly integrated. However, the extent to which archaeological and historical sources of inter-regional trade reflect the degree of economic integration is still not fully understood, a question which lies at the heart of current debates in Roman Studies. Ceramic tableware offers one of the only comparable and quantifiable sources of information for Roman inter-regional trade over centuries-long time periods. The distribution patterns and stylistic features of tablewares from the East Mediterranean dated between 200 BC and AD 300 suggest a competitive market where buying decisions might have been influenced by access to reliable commercial information. We contribute to this debate by representing three competing hypotheses in an agent-based model: success-biased social learning of tableware buying strategies (requiring access to reliable commercial information from all traders), unbiased social learning (requiring limited access), and independent learning (requiring no access). We use approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) to evaluate which hypothesis best describes archaeologically observed tableware distribution patterns. Our results revealed success-bias is not a viable theory and we demonstrate instead that local innovation (independent learning) is a plausible driving factor in inter-regional tableware trade. We also suggest that tableware distribution should instead be explored as a small component of long-distance trade cargoes dominated by foodstuffs, metals, and building materials.

Using city gates as a means of estimating ancient traffic flows

Despite the recent flurry of interest in various aspects of ancient urbanism, we still know little about how much traffic flowed in and out of ancient cities, in part because of problems with using commodities as proxies for trade. This article investigates another approach, which is to estimate these flows from the built environment, concentrating on transport infrastructure such as city gates. To do this, I begin by discussing a new model for how we would expect this kind of infrastructure to expand with population, before investigating the relationship between the populations of sites and the total numbers and widths of city gates, focusing on the Greek and Roman world. The results suggest that there is indeed a systematic relationship between the estimated populations of cities and transport infrastructure, which is entirely consistent with broader theoretical and empirical expectations. This gives us a new way of exploring the connectivity and integration of ancient cities, contributing to a growing body of general theory about how settlements operate across space and time.