Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 265
pastoral practices that were subtly but fundamentally different from what
had gone before.3
In recent scholarship, it has been convincingly argued that this seeming
contradiction can be ascribed to differences in the temporal resolution and
explanatory capabilities of these two categories of evidence. As a consequence,
it would be unwise to read the evidence of the charters as providing incontro-
vertible support for arguments about the decline of the villa system, aggrega-
tion of peasant residences, and the emergence of demesne-style agricultural
management practices.4 Certainly the documentary and legal evidence dis-
plays continuity in the terminology employed to describe areas of land, units
of production, and modes of labour exploitation, but against this apparent
continuity must be placed an appreciation of fundamental changes in the way
that the law is functioning in the period, and in the bases upon which legal
obligations were enforced.5 On the other hand, in acknowledging change we
must resist the urge to assume that there was a monumental, unitary shift from
one form of rural lifeway to another, for in reality processes of agrarian change
in the period are by no means clear and coherent.6 Further, it seems overly
simplistic to identify the Ostrogoths—or the Lombards, or indeed any single
factor—as the fundamental causational factor in any observable transforma-
tions of settlement patterns or economic structures.
Nevertheless, there remains a strong sense in the scholarly literature that
Ostrogothic Italy was a more ‘ruralized’ society than previously. In what follows,
therefore, I offer a brief and relatively unsystematic account of the archaeolog-
ical evidence that has been exploited in the construction of this interpretation.
However, since the longer-term fate of rural settlement on the Italian penin-
sula is not the principal focus of attention here, I suggest that we should not
seek to place the sketchy and incomplete evidence that we currently possess
for rural contexts during the Ostrogothic period within the framework pro-
vided by narratives of incastallemento, for to do so is to impose a misleading
3 For synthetic, orienting discussions of changes in agrarian regimes, techniques, and prac-
tices, Reigniez, “Histoire et techniques”; Rommelaere/Raepsaet, “Les techniques de traction
animale”.
4 Costambeys, “Condition of the Peasantry”, p. 102.
5 Vera, “Proprietà terriera”, pp. 144–5; Costambeys, “Condition of the Peasantry”, p. 98. Koptev,
“Colonate in the Theodosian Code”, p. 263. Compare Lafferty, Law and Society, pp. 166–8.
6 Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne, p. 427, summarizing arguments developed on the basis
of the field survey evidence; Costambeys, “Condition of the Peasantry”, pp. 103–7, providing
further references.