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The Dutch Roman zone has a rich history of archaeological and historical research. In this paper, we present an overview of the current state of knowledge as an introduction to other chapters in this volume dealing with the area’s demography, economy and transport system (Chaps. 2, 3, 7, 9 and 12). The main historical developments are sketched against the background of ongoing archaeological research in the area, and the main hypotheses concerning the development of settlement and the rural economy are discussed.

Based on the three principal and inevitably incomplete information sources on ancient historical demography, and taking into account the particularities of the populations living around the , a largely male population of soldiers and migrants, this chapter examines the factors that may have influenced their dynamics over the short, medium and long term. It also looks at the possible consequences of increased pressure on the environment, heightened risk of epidemics linked to the rise in population concentration, long-distance communication and adverse climate changes observed from the second half of the second century AD. The proposed empirical approach aims to shed light on the factors that shaped the dynamics of these very specific populations over the long term.

In this chapter, a simulation model for better understanding the population dynamics of the zone is presented, building on our earlier study on the possible effects of recruitment of soldiers for the Roman army (Verhagen et al., Modelling the dynamics of demography in the Dutch limes zone. In: Multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research in landscape archaeology. Proceedings of LAC 2014 Conference, Rome, 19–20 September 2014. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam. https://doi.org/10.5463/lac.2014.62, 2016a). In this earlier study, a number of questions were raised concerning the realism of using estimates from historical demographical sources for understanding the population dynamics of the region. In the current paper, the available data sets, approaches and hypotheses regarding fertility and mortality in the Roman period are re-assessed, together with the available archaeological evidence on the population dynamics of the region. A revised model is then presented that allows for more refined experimenting with various demographic scenarios, showing that a much larger number of parameters can be responsible for changes in population growth than is often assumed in archaeological studies. In particular, marriage strategies would seem to play an important role in regulating the number of births. The model remains a work in progress that can be further refined and linked to models of settlement and land use development.

The English Landscape and Identities project (EngLaId), which ran from 2011 to 2016 (ERC grant number 269797), was designed to take a long-term perspective on English archaeology from the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BCE) to the Domesday survey (1086 CE). It was a legacy data project that collated an immense number of records of English archaeology from a large number of different public and academic sources. Within this mountain of material, the Roman period (43 to 410/411 CE) stood out as being particularly fecund, accounting for 40% of the data (by record count) coming from only 15% of the total timespan of the project. This paper examines the ways in which the EngLaId project approached the modelling and analysis of its data for Roman England. We focus here on the three themes of demography, subsistence economy and transportation. Overall, EngLaId provides an interesting contrast to the possibilities and limitations of the other projects presented in this volume because of its large spatiotemporal scale and its (thus necessary) broad-brush approaches to data analysis and modelling. It is also this large spatiotemporal scale that helps situate the Roman period within a much longer span of history, making evident what was unique to this time period and what was constant across multiple periods.

Research concerning settlement dynamics is mainly based on data from archaeological field survey. This method of investigation provides researchers with a lot of information that can help to identify trends and to model the evolution of settlement structure at different scales. Nonetheless, field survey data is sometimes incomplete and only shows a snapshot of the settlements. This static information lacks a certain number of parameters (evolution of architectural, economic, social features, etc.) which are essential to perceive the inherent evolution of the settlements and therefore to visualize their own evolution within the dynamics of settlement trajectory networks. On the other hand, data from archaeological excavations enable us to detect those phenomena. This paper aims to propose a methodological approach to try to resolve this lack of parameters: the creation of an evolutionary model of the settlements from the information collected during excavations. Applied to the sites discovered by field survey, and combined with other analytical tools, the model allows for a better understanding of the diversification phenomena and the processes of spatial development of the settlement pattern. This method, which offers solutions to enhance the static information provided by survey data, was designed for the study of Roman settlement of the Plateau Lorrain (France), but it can be applied to other periods and to other regions as well.

Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in the study of the Roman economy. Methodologically modern economic analysis is now far more acceptable than it once was, and archaeology has become the major source of empirical data for many questions. On the substantive side there is now a far clearer appreciation of the major changes that the Roman economy underwent, with substantial growth of population and aggregate production and even some improvements in standard of living, but followed by equally dramatic decline. This economic success was not limited to the imperial core, but also extended to the provinces.

This chapter presents an agent-based model developed to investigate the impact on land and labour costs of different agricultural strategies that could have been undertaken in the Early and Middle Roman periods (12 BCE to 270 CE) in the Lower Rhine delta. A short description of the sub-processes in ROMFARMS to simulate settlement population dynamics, arable farming, animal husbandry and wood acquisition is provided. The results show that settlements in the Dutch zone during the Roman period were mostly limited by the relatively small labour pool available. Whilst not prevented outright by the availability of labour, the results show that only a small proportion of the total quantity of grain demanded by to military settlements, towns and can be supplied by local settlements. Two different possible scales of supply were envisaged with the results indicating that a macro-regional supply network was more feasible in which all settlements in the Lower Rhine delta were involved in the supply of consumer-only settlements. Whilst several methodological issues were noted, ROMFARMS is presented as an innovative tool for Dutch Roman archaeology with good potential for further development.

The Roman economy has been defined as an agrarian regime, where wheat was mainly cultivated combined with livestock farming and intensive cash crops such as wine and olive oil. Possibilities for economic growth in a winegrowing area such as the Laetanian region in depended upon changes in agrarian productivity but were subject to agro-ecological and agroeconomic endowments that could affect the settlement patterns, the fluctuations in population, the forms of production related to the vineyard crop capacities, the spread of new techniques of cultivation and processing and the adoption of new technological advances. The combination of these factors explains how comparative advantages arose from other winegrowing territories, achieved through intensification and specialization processes that generated an increase of winemaking production surplus capable of being traded in different overseas markets.

This paper analyses rural settlement patterns in the Lower Rhine frontier zone to elucidate the role of forts in the rural economy. Von Thünen’s model of rural marketing suggests that market centres attract intensive cultivation, making them identifiable through spatial analysis of rural settlements. Environmental factors that influenced production capacity, however, can also be expected to exert a strong influence on settlement location, so a multivariate method of spatial analysis is necessary. Using a process of comparative modelling with logistic regression analysis, I test the hypotheses that rural settlements responded to the location of market centres, both civilian and military. I use univariate analysis of settlement territories to identify influential local environmental factors and combine these into a logistic regression model. Then I add a market potential (MP) variable that quantifies the accessibility of marketing opportunities from any location within a market system to see if this factor also shaped settlement patterns. Finally, I vary the centres included in the MP variable to determine whether rural settlements responded to the locations of forts in addition to civilian centres. I find that forts did not generally attract settlements and conclude that smallholders sold their produce primarily in civilian market places.

In Roman landscapes, the particular sites defined as secondary settlements (also known as /villages, minor centres, and/or ) have played an ‘intermediary’ role between the cities and other rural structures (/farms), linked to medium- and long-distance economic and commercial trajectories. The aim of this paper is to apply a multi-scalar approach to model their long-term spatial relationships and connectivity with the Mediterranean exchange network. On the macro-scale, we have analysed a sample of 219 reviewed sites to understand the diachronic trends and spatial dynamics of attraction/proximity to significant elements of the landscape such as towns, roads, rivers and coastline. The Ombrone Valley (Tuscany, Italy) represents a micro-scale case study of a complex system, in which the imported pottery (, African Red Slip ware, ) found in the of Santa Cristina in Caio, the Roman of La Befa and the town of Siena () provided diagnostic ‘macroeconomic’ perspectives. The results show how the secondary settlements occupied a nodal position in the Roman landscape in terms of resilience (long period of occupation until the Early Middle Ages) and spatial organization with a close relationship to natural and anthropic infrastructures and trade functions linked to Mediterranean routes.