The Dependent Tenant: Land Leasing and Labour in Italy and Greece

Abstract

‘Farm’ sites of various kinds have been a striking feature of survey archaeology in most areas of Greece and Italy in recent years, and a number of such sites dating to the Roman period have been located. In many parts of Greece there seem to be particularly large numbers of later Roman sites, with fewer which can be firmly dated to the earlier imperial period, while in a few areas the Imperial Roman period is one of dense occupation. In Italy, too, there seems to be considerable regional variation in peak periods of rural settlement, so that in some areas numbers of small sites are greatest for the Republican period (second to first centuries B.C.), while in other areas there are many small sites of the first century a.d. or even later. The tendency of archaeologists working in both Greece and Italy, especially in the early years of the survey boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was to categorize these smaller sites as peasant farms (generally assuming peasant free-holders), while larger, more opulent sites were classed as ‘villas’. This encouraged both archaeologists and historians to jump to the conclusion that the development of large estates attested in the literary record from the later second century B.C. onward had not effected the complete demise of small-scale, free subsistence farmers.