Regional Productions in Early Roman Gaul

One of archaeology’s main contributions to the debate over the nature of the ancient economy has been to demonstrate that, during the early Roman period, a number of productions developed to an unprecedented scale, providing mass-produced goods for markets that were large, and sometimes relatively distant. Arretine ware, the Tuscan wine transported in Dressel 1 amphorae, Baetican oil and African grain all come into this category. ¹ Moses Finley offered a view of the ancient economy as primitive in nature (that is, organized by kinship, families, and embedded systems of exchange) and minimal in scale (characterized by low levels of surplus production and consumption). ² While ancient historians have mostly tried to answer this challenge by showing what distinctively Greek and Roman social and legal institutions organized economic life in antiquity, ³ and how complex some apparently ‘primitive’ kinds of production were in reality, ⁴ archaeologists have in the main devoted their energy to falsifying Finley’s minimalist claims.