Miko Flohr and Nicolas Monteix (Eds.)
Shops, Workshops and Urban Economic History in the Roman World
Panel 8.3
Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World – Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Cologne/Bonn 2018The material remains of Roman urban shops and workshops long played a marginal role in classical archaeology, but in recent years, they have enjoyed a marked increase of scholarly attention. Influenced by debates about the nature of ancient urban economies, scholars began to study the archaeological evidence for urban retail and manufacturing with an unprecedented vigour from the late 1990s onwards.
Since the turn of the millennium, scholars have increasingly begun to study shop- and workshop design in relation to profit-oriented investment strategies, and to explore the economic history of urban commercial landscapes. This volume discusses the ways in which the study of urban shops and workshops has challenged our conceptualization of urban economic history in the Roman world, and it explores possible avenues to further deepen our understanding of the changing nature of Roman urban commerce, and to bridge spatial and chronological distances between local sets of evidence.
Miko Flohr is university lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University. He has studied the archaeology of everyday work in Pompeii and Ostia, and its social and economic contexts, and then moved on to study the historical relation between investment and commerce in Roman Italy by investigating the architectural history of the taberna from the middle Republic to late Antiquity.
Nicolas Monteix is maître de conférences in Roman history and archaeology at Université de Rouen – Normandie (2010) and junior fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France (2015). After first works on shops and workshops in Herculaneum, he moved towards the archaeology of Roman techniques, trying to perceive their evolutions and to understand the social and economic transformations induced therein.