Lecture: Kimberly Bowes, "Landscapes of the Poor in Late Antiquity"

Date
Sep 26, 2017, 4:30 pm4:30 pm
Location
Room 103 Scheide Caldwell House

Speaker

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Event Description

The fate of the countryside in late antiquity has been hotly debated, with much recent work on the continuity - or not - of villas, trade and agricultural production in different parts of the empire. This paper presents new work from central Italy, gathered during a project focused on the lives and landscapes of the rural poor. The questions of continuity, transformation and cultural impoverishment look different when viewed from the bottom up, both in the light of a late Republican and Imperial past, and through some of the first data gathered specifically about small-holders. This new data points to both a more radical reorganization of daily rural life, as more vibrant economies of both production and consumption, than heretofore supposed.

Kim Bowes is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an archaeologist, specializing in the archaeology of late antique religions, domestic architecture, and Roman economics. She received her doctorate from Princeton University, held a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University and assistant professorships at Fordham University and Cornell University. Author of four books and dozens of articles, she has just completed major field project on Roman poverty in Tuscany, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Kim was the 22nd director of the American Academy in Rome.