Peasants, Agriculture, and Environment in the 1st Millennium CE Italian Countryside: A Bayesian approach

This dissertation explores the subsistence methods, economic systems and environmental adaptations of Italian peasant communities in the 1st millennium CE, with a particular focus on the transitional period from the Roman Empire to the early medieval era. Existing work on agricultural production in this period has been based on literary sources and field surveys, or has focused on individual sites or regional collec-tions, while a multi-source archaeological study is absent from the discourse. This work addresses this gap by using environmental proxies to reconstruct the historical agricultural landscape through plant and animal occurrence patterns in legacy data. To this end, 190 botanical and 466 faunal assemblages from 309 sites are quantitatively analysed within a Bayesian framework, revealing a strong trend towards re-gionalisation in agricultural strategies during the early medieval period. In addition, these findings expose variations in agricultural techniques and dietary patterns across Roman settlements, shedding light on the extent to which Roman agricultural and economic frameworks persisted or changed during the early medieval transition, and the adaptive agricultural strategies adopted by farmers. The quantitative analyt-ical findings are also contextualised alongside wider historical sources, archaeological evidence, and cur-rent debate, allowing for a bottom-up understanding of the agricultural regimes in question. This work represents the first attempt to use temporally and geographically diverse bioarchaeological data to visu-alise the Italian agricultural landscape across the longue durée.