 I'm a historian by training, not an archaeologist, this means my slides will be slightly uglier than they were accustomed to, but in my project that focuses on the study of animal feed production as a marker for the effectiveness of Roman economy and Roman husbandry economy in particular, it is of course logically that I use a lot of archaeological data next to other sources like ethnographical literature and archaeological literature. I started in earnest in January 2018 at this project so a lot of it is still exploratory. In this presentation I will explain the historiography of the Roman Italian husbandry, the discussions about it, my critique on those debates to contextualize my research question and then I will give a glimpse of what I will try to do with my model, but that's the most exploratory part of this presentation. Then on to the historiography, studies focusing on Roman agriculture from the 1970s to the 1990s were mostly focused on the food supply of ancient society and how that corresponded to growing populations and there was also a very influential debate between at one hand the primitivists and at the other hand the modernists who had wildly sometimes different interpretations of how effective the Roman economy worked, but even early modernist authors like Katie White had very negative pessimistic accounts really of what Roman husbandry can entail and mostly these theories both by those early modernists and the pessimists where the primitivists are to be summarized as a sort of tension between food supply for humans and food supply for animals and the lack of good quality agricultural land in Italy due to dry summers, unpredictable rainfall and in the more temperate mountainous regions the difficult terrain and periods of snow and ice were identified as hindrances for the blossoming of husbandry economics and so they assumed that mainly grain, olives and grapes were produced and that this also gave a negative feedback loop because of the lack of animals there was a lack of manure and the relatively scarcity of agricultural land played into that and these days became the driving force behind the reasoning that livestock holdings were mainly meager and mostly consisting out of pastoral forms away from farms more oriented towards food production for humans but then due to contributions of archaeologists mainly archaeozoologists and archaeobotanists this view shifted the paleobotanical remains show the variety of potential fodder and grazing products maintained near roman italian farms and large urban zones and this is also found back in the sources so when you look chronologically to the agronomists you see that more species of plants are introduced especially more legumes and the fabracere are introduced on the on the land and we see in general studies compiling local studies like McKinnon's production and consumption of roman animals that there is a variety of animals on each farm and no signs of diseases due to malnutrition in almost all of the zoo archaeological databases he researches so we see next to that also clear evidence through osteometric studies that the cattle sizes increased due to the whole roman period and that they improved also in the provinces where husbandry practices were most likely introduced from the italian mainland and this we have a form of a mystery and it is how where the roman italian is so successful in overcoming those hindrances from their natural environment to feed their cattle so successfully and then and in a very recent re-enviarating debate about it about how feed stuff for animal could be a marker of roman productivity there was a trophy crown who proposed that the introduction of legumes was a catchall solution almost for how animals could be feed could be fed and this uh this was mostly to do due to the technique of lay farming so alternating between grain and legumes or with intercropping you will see a field of onions intercropped with vaches and this intercropping could lead also that agricultural land meant for food production was not a hindrance to the land that could be used to feed animals also but more or less this is the consensus today that lay farming is the catch all the dissolution to the the question why were romans roman italians capable of feeding their animals but maybe there's a somewhat simplistic explanation because Italy and roman Italy of course also is in a very diverse uh country and its regions and its landscapes are very different and not all the landscapes are evenly suited for lay farming uh and the farming of legumes in general we see in anthropological literature that there is a favorites of transhumans especially in the south of italy where there is a lot of droughts uh during the summers and that legume raising is not so interesting to feed your animals there over there and when we look at the gas model the model you see uh on the the right the global agroecological zones model from the FAO you see that uh yeah the capacity to produce legumes in and pulses in in Italy is widely different so it can be that for all the sites that were uh attested in the zoological uh data that held a wide variety of healthy animals that legumes are the only solution to that and next to that we also see when we look back into the primary sources that mostly all uh mentions of pulses and of green hay meant for cattle and farm animals were conserved for the more vulnerable animals like lambs and uh for animals that were used to uh produce uh very specialized items like terentine sheep known for their uh wool and uh yeah uh next to that it's it's very striking that there is a bit of a benevolent reading by the proponents of the theory that legumes could provide a catch-all solution to the question my rodents uh it grew over in Italian sources successful feeding their animals in the sources they read that they know of these legumes and that these legumes must have been uh used by a broad variety of farmers in room in Italy and this was probably the case but not at the scale that uh could attest for the zoological data we find and another difficulty is of course that a lot of these legumes are also used in the human diet and that it's archaeologically very difficult uh to seek out which remains are meant for animals and which remains are meant for humans it's very easily uh when you have carbonized hay deposits or a storage room next to an animal pan but these finds are seldom uh and and scarce so we can't really rely on that too then how did they maintain their lives so successfully for that based on anthropological literature uh pre-modern and modern economic history on husbandry practices and uh contemporary sources mostly developmental economics and uh and mostly different economics on arid and semi-arid regions i have four hypotheses i want to test with my model my gis model and those are that uh outfields and agricultural byproducts are an integral part of all animal feeding strategies from elite farmers to smallholders that the integration of different context-based husbandry strategies was integral to the overall success of roman husbandry meaning that the italian romans uh adapted their husbandry management systems to the landscapes they worked in over time uh the third is that grazing pressure increased first on land suitable for arable cultivation and the fourth is that carrying capacities varied locally in time and space as well as the species of introduced animals and plants and there is an interesting parallel to the earlier presentation which the inclusion to the largeening of the economic zone gives new opportunities to farmers to find new ways to overcome natural hindrances and then for the model i have one will to seek out what the potential livestock farming carrying capacities were if they did change over time and if that change over time was an increase in exploited land or an increase in animal density or both simultaneously or decreases of course and uh if it differentiate between regions where romans by the largeening of their empire uh suddenly aware that there was a comparative advantage to different landscapes and that they use markets or other forms of changes to exploit that to its most utmost capacity and i use two different approaches one is the landscape analysis and one is uh more based on site analysis i use these sources to uh go deeper into that the historical perspective so the primary sources i i already showed the comparative perspective the ethnography uh archaeology and archaebotany and also geographical uh perspective mostly due to gis and modern gis data on elevation on access to water that of course has to be interpreted against the historical data we have and that all is integrated in a historical gis and the first phase is just the landscape analysis and for this i will shortly go over the main maps i intend to make that are all different maps first is is a mapping of which crops and animals are economically exploited and where is there a difference between the south and the north and the middle part uh that we can find that uh can be given due to uh legacy sources in archaeology and also by historical legislation and we can validate it through the use of agricultural literature and the second map is which landscapes were suitable for which crops and if you can make a sort of typology of landscapes which were most suitable for which crops and which can give the most preferable outcomes therefore i use side surveys and data provided from them on the plant species that were cultivated from them and also ethnographic material to have concrete data because of course the data is very sparse then i may know about which landscapes are suitable for which animals based on modern agricultural maps based on elevation maps based on access to water based on possibilities for transhumans in a different landscape and how these are connected then i may know of which landscapes are accessible for whom mostly due to historical legislative sources the idea for example the public problem lantern road that was free to graze for most farmers in their cabins for a small pea and the re-private lands and the emergence of larger prediction nodes that concentrate a lot of land and had as an influence that a lot smaller farmers were pushed out of that land and it was more difficult for them to their animals to graze in lands and then also i make a sort of classification i do not make it i take it mostly from robert britchett robert britchett for durnham the classification of farm sizes i look at which farm sizes are tested in the archaeological record or i can place them throughout these maps and i also try to hypothesize other farms mostly smaller farms because for there is a bias towards larger farms more urban regions and for the more far off regions in land regions and smaller farms i try to be both sides and look what for results we can get when we compare this to your maps for everything and then also at last but not as important because it's suddenly done is the role of markets integration right activity which landscapes can be easily reached which food products and which animal food products can be transported easily to be defined also in the legislative source is something about maximum prices for these products and what are the capacities to disperse them throughout market that are the maps i want to make in this research phase and then the outcome of it should be a spatial analysis of husbandry potential a series of opportunity maps would change over time an economic analysis of the costs and benefits is there indeed a tension between food and feed and how what is your record and due to the use of different landscapes and then at last a diagnosis of the key success factors for husbandry throughout all the the different maps and the comparison between them and then secondly i will do an in-depth site analysis based on test space sites that have yet to be selected for the most part i have data sets given to me from Robert Witcher and Helen Butch out on the Tiber Valley but i'm seeking out more data to work with and what makes a good case study for me is that there are different types of landscapes within a single project more hilly more plains an urban environment smaller scale farms that were researched that's really interesting for me to have a broad overview the different farm sizes and the social stratification within that landscape that is really well attested that there was not due to time concerns or funding concerns a focus on the larger and then the data the geographical the archaeological the archaeological data that i already mentioned that we can compile this together here that's uh and then for the for the carrying capacities i make an abstraction based on a modern american model that's the difference between pie model and the commercial model to model uh carrying capacities is of course they have an observational an empiric model they use observation i have to make a mechanistic model so i have to use ranges these figures you see here for the minimal residual dry matter i'm looking for are ethnographical attested optimums but i will have to make ranges of them which fuzzy numbers in the modeling to to really attest for all the the nuances i will have to take an account for and then the animal units have to be abstracted also this comes to a very simple equation of the production of animal feeds minus the residual dry matter it has to remain on the fields to keep it fertile to make it interesting to our slave farming and to not make it barren over time and then the divisor underneath is figure that is the ideal amount of dry matter consumed by one animal unit per month and then i can figure out what's an animal unit month is on how many months a different landscape can feed one animal unit this is then how the model looks like in gis because then of course all the other uh data have to be incorporated and all the other data has to be has to be worked out from that simple equation and then you have these types of maps uh based on uh you can see the topography the wood covered distance to water sources and how interesting it is for animals uh for farmers to keep animals in that environment and then uh you can have a favorable production map now it's based on pounds of dry matter uh that you can produce on in a different landscape but it could also work with animal unit months when you can see how many months an animal can how many animals can be fed for how many months in a different landscape and that's uh should give the same outcomes as the first research phase but with a focus on localized forms of specialization in husbandry practice with what is introduced and uh i'm going to leave you with that because my time is up thank you for your attention