Ancient World Seminar: Astrid van Oyen (Radboud University), “Roman failure: inequality in practice at Podere Marzuolo ”

Abstract

The case of the Early Imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site’s existence, an abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures? This paper uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality: who could fail in the Roman world, and for whom was failure not an option? Was failure tied up with particular notions of the future, and were those equally distributed? Did failure in the Roman world feature as a stepping-stone towards growth, as per modern Silicon Valley-credos?

About the speaker

Astrid van Oyen is an archaeologist studying Roman Italy and the Western provinces, exploring the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of empire, craft production, storage, and rural economies. She is particularly interested in the socio-economic history of non-elites. Prior to joining Radboud University she was Associate Professor at Cornell University.

Her most recent book The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (Cambridge University Press, 2020) cuts across the scales of farmer and state to trace the practical and moral reverberations of storage from villas in Italy to silos in Gaul, and from houses in Pompeii to warehouses in Ostia. Following on from the material turn, an abstract notion of ‘surplus’ makes way for an emphasis on storage’s material transformations (e.g. wine fermenting; grain degrading; assemblages forming), which actively shuffle social relations and economic possibilities, and are a sensitive indicator of changing mentalities.