vintage.
To some extent the literary sources can be supplemented, especially in the Greek world, where there was
a tradition of recording documents on stone (in the West bronze was often used for the less common
inscriptions, and might be melted down for re-use). In all areas what survives does so by chance, often in
fragments; but recent discoveries have changed our ideas in many respects. Archaeology proper shows
us how in some parts of Italy in the second century subsistence agriculture gave way to larger slave-run
estates producing for a market, and documents the growth of overseas trade with these more developed
areas. But not all Italy has been, or can be, surveyed; and outside it most of the work has been
concentrated in, this time, the western Mediterranean. And much trade leaves no trace; pottery and
marble may survive, but what of slaves, corn, dried fish, spices? Still, we know that black-glazed table
ware was exported from the western coast of central Italy to Gaul and Spain from the earlier second
century, with an increasing number of the amphoras or wine-jars, of which it has been estimated that
perhaps 40,000,000 were imported into Gaul between 150 B.C. and the end of the Republic. Wrecks of
ships on their way to Rome from the East have also been found; works of art old and new (statues, that
is; paintings would perish) have been recovered, with in one case such curiosities as old Greek
inscriptions and a complex astronomical device. Finally numismatics, as coin hoards and other
discoveries gradually fix the date of Greek and Roman issues, can tell us something of economic
changes. But controversy still rages, for example about why, on several crucial occasions, Rome went to
war.