AN UNDERDEVELOPED ECONOMY 87juridical and epigraphic sources – now arguments drawn from archaeology
are employed. One argument treats the sharp downturn in the Trajanic
period of amphorae of types Dressel 2–4, the main carriers of Italian wine
in the fi rst century, as evidence for the collapse of Italian viticulture. Another
fi nds confi rmatory evidence in villa decay and abandonment in the area that
was formerly the centre of speculative wine production and of the ‘slave
mode of production’, central Italy from Etruria to Campania.
One problem is that the two phenomena are correlated in only a limited
way. Only in maritime Etruria, in the area between Monte Argentario and
Pyrgi, is there a chronological coincidence between the decadence of villas
and the disappearance of Dressel 2–4. The dilemma is not resolved by a
chronological extension of the period of crisis. Apart from throwing doubt
on the appropriateness of the term ‘crisis’, this leads to confusion: did the
crisis cover the century from the mid- second century to the mid- third
(Staerman), or the second century from Trajan to Commodus (Carandini) or
the whole period from Augustus to Severus (Carandini again)?
Again, the archaeological arguments raise doubts. The sudden reduction
in the numbers of Dressel 2–4 might mean simply that these amphora types
were replaced by other carriers yet to be identifi ed, just as Dressel 2–4 had
supplanted the heavier Dressel 1 in the last decades of the fi rst century BC.
This is not altogether an argument from silence. Some literary references
indicate that the better quality Italian wines continued to sell well in Rome
and elsewhere, and that they were still carried in (unidentifi ed) amphorae. It
is worth emphasizing that Italian products bypassing Ostia, because they
came to Rome overland or by river, leave no archaeological record in any
period. Secondly, villas did not decay at the same time or universally. (They
continued, incidentally, in Spanish Tarraconensis, which apparently found a
suitable replacement for Dressel 2–4 in the container Gallic 5.) In maritime
southern Etruria the villas had decayed by the Antonine period, but further
inland not till the early third century; similarly they were still in operation
in third- century Latium near Rome, in the ager Falernus , along the Adriatic
coast and in south Italy (where they survived, in small numbers as ever, into
the fourth century at least). The cycle of growth, prosperity and decay –
which affected other types of agricultural exploitation as well as the
medium- sized slave- staffed estate – was differently paced between and
within regions.
The present state of the evidence means, therefore, that it is impossible to
provide a fi rm chronological setting or a convincing socio- economic context
for structural change of the kind that has been posited. The wine industry as
far as we know was forced to make one major reorientation, and only one,
between the inauguration of the fi rst emperor and the middle of the third
century, a period of prolonged political instability, constant civil and foreign
warfare, and reduced markets. This was right at the beginning of the period,
when the slave- staffed villas, which had fl ourished especially in central
Tyrrhenian Italy on the remarkable export trade in wine to Gaul, had to fi nd