The Eternal City? : economic evidence and the changing nature of urban spaces in Late Antique Rome

Abstract

This thesis examines the amphora assemblages from a series of excavated Late Antique waste deposits within the city of Rome.  The data from these assemblages in interrogated quantitatively and spatially in order to address questions of the nature of supply within the urban centres of the Late Empire and to understand the changing urban socio-political environment of the Late Antique period with particular reference to Rome.  The principal tenets of the approach are reliant upon a contextual evaluation of the material which informs our understanding of the city in Late Antiquity.

This thesis sets out the background to the study of these assemblages through a discussion of the principal approaches which have been taken to studying the economy and food supply of Rome. An overview of the pertinent archaeological approaches to trade and exchange and the prevailing understanding of the nature of the city of Rome are then discussed in order to fully contextualise this work within the current understanding of the topographical, geographical and historical background of the city.

This research studies the movement of amphorae both into the city and also within the intra-urban area.  The locations of the deposits are studied with the intention of understanding the pattern of this movement of goods within the city and also of the motivation behind the selection of the deposition sites.  This research provides an interpretation of the changing nature of Late Antique urban spaces within Rome and offers an explanation for the rationale behind this process.  The thesis sets out to reprioritise the role of archaeological data within the discussion of this period and to demonstrate that it is possible to discuss the changing nature of the city of Rome on the basis of solid archaeological data.

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