Panel 8.3 – Shops, Workshops and Urban Economic History in the Roman World

Organiser/Chair:

• Miko Flohr (University of Leiden)
• Nicolas Monteix (Université de Rouen)

Speakers:

• Steven Ellis (University of Cincinnati)
  Salve Lucrum?: Questioning the economic (ir)rationality of Roman retail landscapes
• Miko Flohr (University of Leiden)
  Commerce and architecture in the late Hellenistic world: the emergence of the taberna row
• Rhodora Vennarucci (University of Arkansas)
  Shop Design as Marketing Strategy in The Shops of Roman Ostia
• Adeline Hoffelinck (Ghent University)
  New light on the commercial landscape of Roman cities: towards an archaeological research agenda
• Jeroen Poblome (University of Leuven)
  Work/Shop till you drop. Collated evidence from South-Western Asia Minor on (work)shops and associated people, between Hellenistic times and late antiquity
• Elizabeth Murphy (University of Bonn)
  Spatial Developments in Urban Industry from Roman Imperial to Late Antique Periods in the Eastern Mediterranean
• Helmut Schwaiger (Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut)
  A Late Antique City Quarter in Ephesos: Social Differentiation and Functional Heterogeneity

The material remains of Roman urban shops and workshops long played a marginal role in classical archaeology, but in recent years, they have enjoyed a marked increase of scholarly attention. Influenced by debates about the nature of ancient urban economies, scholars began to study the archaeological evidence for urban retail and manufacturing with an unprecedented vigour from the late 1990s onwards, and increasingly began to experiment with novel ways of interpreting it. Still, opinions diverge as to the actual interpretative power of archaeologically identifiable shops and workshops: their real contribution to our understanding of the history of Roman urban economies is a matter of debate. On the one hand, scholars have increasingly expressed pessimism about the possibilities to use archaeological remains as a starting point for quantifying output in absolute terms, and about the extent to which shops and workshops were oriented towards local or supra-local markets; on the other hand, they have increasingly begun to assess aspects of shop- and workshop design in relation to investment strategies and profitability, and to explore the economic history of urban commercial landscapes. At this point, a critical challenge ahead lies in counter-balancing the fragmentation of discourse: while good evidence comes from all directions, and in a variety of forms, and while the available categories of evidence are being studied in a variety of places, archaeologists have difficulty in connecting the threads, and – more than those studying crafts and retail on the basis of epigraphy and literary texts – suffer to develop a comparative perspective over larger geographical areas. Hence, it is time to put this interpretative integration explicitly on the agenda. This session will bring together scholars who have studied this evidence from a variety of angles and in a variety of places in the Roman Mediterranean. It will discuss the ways in which recent developments in the study of urban shops and workshops have (and have not) challenged our conceptualization of urban economic history in the Roman world, and it will explore possible avenues to further deepen our understanding of the changing nature of Roman urban commerce, and to bridge spatial and chronological distances between local sets of evidence.

1. Steven Ellis (University of Cincinnati)

Salve Lucrum?: Questioning the economic (ir)rationality of Roman retail landscapes
That tabernae once dominated the busiest street-fronts of most Roman cities is a fact long known. And though their frequency was often overlooked for much of the 20th century, and their value to urban studies largely ignored, in more recent years we have witnessed a rising interest in Roman retail outlets. These days the common explanation for both their presence and placement in the Roman city is pinned on profit. Naturally the motivation for financial gains from urban investment makes immediate sense to us: we see the lure of reditus, after all, pressed into mosaics (SALVE LUCRUM; CIL X 874), with the economic rationality of commercial construction (and abandonment) tied to the ebbs and flows of the broader urban economy.
Rational and real though this singular motivation will have been, it is at once an over-simplification and, more problematically still, a rendering of the urban economy that limits our understanding about both the place of tabernae in the Roman socio-economy and the fuller range of motivations to invest in them. The aim of this paper is to explore the plurality of social and economic agencies - rational or otherwise - behind retail investment across multiple Roman cities and over time. It is about who opened tabernae, as well as where, when, and why. An ultimate objective is to complicate what we know of Roman tabernae, which is an aim that might better integrate the topic with the richer and (seemingly) more sophisticated studies of Roman urbanization.

2. Miko Flohr (University of Leiden)

Commerce and architecture in the late Hellenistic world: the emergence of the taberna row
One of the more radical developments in the commercial history of Roman cities is the emergence, in the second century BC, of the taberna as a defining factor in urban space. While the taberna had a history before this period, it is the second century BC that saw the emergence of new models and practices: the taberna not only began to be built everywhere, it also began to be built in a much greater variety of architectural contexts.
One key innovation of the second century BC is the ‘taberna row’, a commercial building that simply consisted of a sequence of tabernae and, occasionally, a porticus. This paper starts from the idea that the emergence and spread of this building type present an important new chapter in the history of cities in the Roman world. Analyzing the contexts in which this new building type emerged and flourished, it will argue that the taberna row initially had a relatively limited spread, but that its appearance nonetheless signals a rapid increase in the commercialization of urban economies, and in the commodification of commercial facilities.

3. Rhodora Vennarucci (University of Arkansas)

Shop Design as Marketing Strategy in The Shops of Roman Ostia
After a transformative shift toward fixed-point retailing occurred in the mid-Republic, civic improvements initiated by Augustus unified shop fronts with the streets, producing more harmonized streetscapes in towns around Italy. Although still viewed by marketing historians as a modern innovation of retail, “shopping streets” – streets characterized by a high frequency of shops and the presence of architectural installations, such as porticoes, arcades, and sidewalks - dominated the commercial landscape of Ostia by the 2nd/3rd c CE. Contributing to recent work on Roman urbanism, this paper employs an interdisciplinary approach, integrating retail change theory and consumer culture theory, to investigate the evolution of the shopping street in the harbor town of Ostia and its impact on consumer behavior. As the shopping street became embedded within the urban image, the activity of shopping became part of the urban experience, encouraging a shift from functional buying to shopping as a cultural activity imbued with a sense of enjoyment and/or social significance. Evidence from Ostia suggests that shopkeepers, as urban placemakers, may have actively contributed to these developments through the management of their shops and street environments (raising the level of the street, installing benches, shop décor), indicating that the architecture of a shopping street, as a social artifact of the shared experiences of its local inhabitants, has excellent potential for providing a more nuanced understanding of Roman urban culture from below.

4. Adeline Hoffelinck (Ghent University)

New light on the commercial landscape of Roman cities: towards an archaeological research agenda
When studying the urban economy of the Roman world and in particular the Italian peninsula one always refers to the well-known sites of Pompeii, Ostia and Herculaneum, where the extensive material remains of shops and workshops provide us with a glimpse of their bustling economic life. While the study of these cities was and still remains essential in investigating the Roman economy and urbanization, many other sites have been neglected and need to be brought into current debates. This mainly concerns cities whose remains are currently not visible to the modern eye because they simply were not preserved in an extraordinary way and have not been the subject of long term excavations. That these lost towns can be mapped and visually reconstructed by means of non-invasive full coverage surveys has been proven during many recent projects in the Roman Mediterranean world. Within my talk I would like to propose an agenda for future research in which the integration of non-destructive methods for the study of urban commercial space gets the upper hand. These methods have the potential to bring many other Roman sites into the debate, making way for a comparative approach of cities over broader geographical areas than central Tyrrhenian Italy. By empowering the methodological approach and expanding the geographical focus substantial information can be gained on the relationship between the economic environment and a wide range of urbanization processes.

5. Jeroen Poblome (University of Leuven) / Dorien Slotman / Fran Strootbants / Johan Claeys / Sam Cleymans

Work/Shop till you drop. Collated evidence from South-Western Asia Minor on (work)shops and associated people, between Hellenistic times and late antiquity
This paper aims at collecting the available evidence on the infrastructure of workshops and shops in urbanizing, urban or de-urbanizing communities in South-Western Asia Minor, between middle Hellenistic times and the end of poleis, as we know them. Apart from the physical, oftentimes archaeological evidence, the paper will further look into epigraphical or otherwise historical evidence, related to these places, the people involved in producing or retailing goods, and the practices and institutions regulating these aspects of ancient society. This evidence will be considered against wider backgrounds, such as general shifting opportunity costs in the productive landscape, levels of monetisation of these provincial communities, living conditions of the workforce, aspects of their quality of life and communal practices associated with these breadwinners.

6. Elizabeth Murphy (University of Bonn)

Spatial Developments in Urban Industry from Roman Imperial to Late Antique Periods in the Eastern Mediterranean
Ancient cities, with their wide range of services as well as their dense and diverse populations, relied on some degree of planning to organize space. In considering economic spaces as reflections of social negotiations among urban communities, changes to the scale of investment in and location of economic space offers insight into shifting cultural perceptions of commercial and productive activities within the cityscape. This paper investigates economic topographies of cities from the Roman Imperial period through Late Antiquity in order to investigate changing industrial spaces. By comparing workshop units within and between cities in the eastern Mediterranean, patterns in the scale, character, and status of manufacturing segments of urban society from the 1st c. BC to the 7th c. AD are discerned. The results of this study, on the one hand, highlight general trends in the changing use of urban space—e.g., the movement of industry into city centers and public buildings in Late Antiquity, the phasing of industries taking over public buildings, and the changing distribution patterns of different types of industry. It likewise, highlights variability across the region that more likely reflects local decision-making in urban transformation.

7. Helmut Schwaiger and Jasmin Scheifinger, Katharina Sahm and Sabine Ladstätter (Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut)

A Late Antique City Quarter in Ephesos: Social Differentiation and Functional Heterogeneity
Classical archaeological urban research informs the idea of a functional spatial division via the creation of city quarters. Private residential districts as well as areas of workshops and commercial activity are confronted with public space. A completely different picture is presented by the Late Antique city quarter in Ephesos, which in recent years has been extensively excavated and whose time of origin is dated to the early 5th century AD. Workshops and tabernae not only are immediately adjacent to prestigious domestic buildings, but are also structurally interwoven with them. In addition, no coherent house type can be deduced; instead, the houses are units that are conceived of in a completely varying manner, and differ from each other in their size, sequence and disposition of rooms, and equipment.
Permanent installations bear witness to wine and oil production as well as the storing and further processing of agricultural products. Trading and industrial activities are demonstrable in streetside shops. An appraisal of the archaeozoological material resulted in evidence for the processing of meat and seafood. Furthermore, extensive mapping of objects allows zones of activity to be defined in the individual households.
The picture obtained from the excavations is characterised by heterogeneity and social differentiation, often at a distance of only a few metres. In a virtual reconstruction a partial excavation should be confronted with the extensive one, and the diverse results should be critically discussed, above all with regard to the relationship between private and public space.