The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family

The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family by Astrid Van Oyen offers a fresh perspective on an old topic. The study of ancient storage has historically concerned questions of risk buffering at the individual level and social evolution at the state level, both of which have traditionally been approached by focusing on the presence or absence of storage infrastructure and its quantification. This is certainly the case in the Roman imperial context, where the concern for stored resources, food in particular, has been central to histories of Rome's socioeconomy since Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (1973). Van Oyen's focus on the materiality of storage, however, compels readers to move beyond questions of presence/absence and quantification and to consider the multidimensional qualities of storage as a practice (4), exploring the historical specificity of Roman storage between the later Republican and early imperial periods ("What was Roman about storage in the Roman empire?") and its comparative potential ("What was imperial about storage in the Roman empire?") (10).The book is organized around concepts central to materiality scholarship: matter, practice, assemblage, flow, and scale. Each of the five body chapters examines one of these concepts with a different case study. Before this, however, the introductory chapter, "Surplus" (Ch. 1), situates the book within the larger history of ancient storage studies, introduces its theoretical framing, and discusses its organization and scope. Van Oyen defines storage as "ranging things in a particular place with a view to future retrieval and use" (6). As such, Van Oyen sees storage as a mode of equal engagement between humans and things stored across time, thus drawing attention to storage's potential and not just its actualization. This is important as it recognizes the intrinsic vitality of storage and stored goods, including processes of rot and fermentation, as well as those more abstract but nonetheless real qualities related to the storer's hopes and fears. Such thinking is in line with the material turn in the social studies and humanities, which emphasizes that nonhuman things are active agents in mutually constitutive relationships with all components of life. This definition also opens up new ways of studying old evidence, as is made clear in the book's first body chapter."Needs/Wants (Matter)" (Ch. 2) explores the materiality of storage in central Italian villas and its role in shaping the moral trope of the "good farmer." Van Oyen studies a well-trodden dataset—the remains of central Italian villa estate water, grain, and wine storage infrastructure. Rather than seeing such infrastructure merely as evidence of conspicuous production and consumption, Van Oyen points out how storage of these staple goods and resources, a necessary risk-buffering strategy given the Mediterranean's inherently unstable environment, defined the very question of "when profit-making and display tipped over into intolerable luxuria" (23). Plans and databases of the structural remains of villa estate storage facilities (tables A1–3) are employed to study how these material spaces afforded new possibilities for elite self-fashioning as they evolved in response to the influx of wealth from Rome's conquests. Van Oyen discusses specifically their diversification from generic all-purpose spaces to specialized facilities, their disconnection from the main villa building, and their monumentalization. While it is possible that a number of the many generic all-purpose storage facilities discussed have been misidentified (a possibility that the author herself notes 26), these changes, as Van Oyen argues, nonetheless demonstrate "morality in action" (37)."Future (Practice)" (Ch. 3) moves beyond Roman Italy to explore the role of storage in Roman provincial consolidation. The discussion focuses on southwest Gaul and northeast Iberia, spanning both their preconquest and Roman provincial eras. Through comparative analysis of preconquest sunken grain silos and later Roman-era wine dolia, Van Oyen finds that the shift in use between the two, and attendant structural changes in the region's agricultural economy, were partly facilitated by a shared practical memory (i.e., memory made through practice). This shared practical memory, as Van Oyen argues, continued to "foster flexible, ad hoc decision making" after Rome's conquest of the region (82). At the same time, the shift from sunken grain silos, hermetically sealed and thus temporally fluid in terms of their indefinite "use-by" date, to above-ground and centrally organized granaries, which required more precisely timed turnover due to the threat of spoiling, facilitated Roman control. One might fruitfully apply a similar approach to study other processed and stored goods in provincial contexts, such as garum and salsamentum, production of which was mostly located outside of Italy and involved fermentation, careful preservation, and networks of local producers (Motz 2021)."Knowledge (Assemblage)" (Ch. 4) returns to Italy to examine storage in the houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Van Oyen first explores the archaeological context of storage within Vesuvian houses using a database that shows the variety and multifunctionality of Vesuvian household storage (table A4). She identifies dispersed storage patterns, circulation of goods between preferred storage locations, compartmentalized storage containers that obscured the variety of stored goods (thus thwarting easy calculability), and heterogenous contents targeted to certain containers based on frequency of use rather than on kind (e.g., daily dining equipment stored within more easily accessed cupboards). These findings, Van Oyen argues, reveal the dynamism of storage assemblages and highlight the unique knowledge of those who managed such assemblages.Within the larger material turn in archaeology, the assemblage is often defined as a dynamic entanglement of things, both material and nonmaterial, all of which are tied together by unequal power relations. Such framing has been made especially popular in archaeology by Ian Hodder, whose theory of entanglement emphasizes how artifacts draw humans and other things together through ties of enabling or limiting dependencies (Hodder 2012). Van Oyen, however, departs from such thinking by considering disentanglement, something which Hodder doubts is possible. For Van Oyen, the act of storing enables disentanglement by redefining the stored assemblage as something entirely new and, importantly, unrelated to its original function(s) and association(s). One might ask what new entanglements arise from storage itself. Van Oyen answers this question by considering the people who managed stored goods in household contexts, most likely the matrona or a trusted slave. Through storage, things are made to forget, but people are "forced to remember" (118). Such framing will certainly complement new approaches in the microeconomic study of Vesuvian households, which prioritize thick datasets often excavated within storage furniture and fixtures (Bowes 2021). But as Van Oyen warns, "The functions and meanings that archaeologists try to make artifacts remember are precisely what these artifacts were forced to forget in their ancient contexts of use" (115)."Control (Flow)" (Ch. 5) dives into the quintessential material of Roman storage—the warehouses of Ostia and Portus, Rome's major ports. Here Van Oyen grapples with a leading debate in Roman storage scholarship, specifically the question of which agents, whether private individuals or the state, controlled storage at Ostia and Portus and the flow of goods into Rome. But as Van Oyen makes clear, this debate can never reveal the whole story, as there was no clear separation between private and public in the Roman economy. Rather than asking "who" controlled storage at Ostia and Portus, Van Oyen explores "how" this storage was practiced (129–30). To do this, Van Oyen compares the architectural plans of each port's storage infrastructure. Ostia is characterized by "courtyard and corridor-type" warehouses of varied size, which were well integrated within the preexisting urban fabric and were marked by visible and individualized forms of control. The "spine type" warehouses at Portus, however, are more standardized and set apart from the urban fabric, allowing for easier access and calculability of their contents. The warehouses at Portus, Van Oyen argues, make sense in the context of the Roman imperial economy and Rome's ever-growing need for provincial goods to sustain its population and the emperor's power. In a similar fashion to the small household storage studied in Chapter 4, the monumental storage at Portus acted as a mechanism of disentanglement: foreign goods that flowed through Portus would transform from something not Roman into something Roman."Reproduction (Scale)" (Ch. 6) brings together these case studies to present a new model of the Roman empire, one which emphasizes the human-thing relationships that substantiated and organized power across different scales. Van Oyen describes this model as a kaleidoscope, with different socioeconomic relations between different actors (both human and nonhuman) and concepts continuously folding together at various scales. Drawing from models of Roman imperial power that view the relationship between the emperor and his subjects as one of patron and client (e.g., Saller 1997), such folding, according to Van Oyen, was facilitated by the family, specifically the elastic relational ties between the paterfamilias, dependent slaves, freedmen, and, as Van Oyen adds, things. All these actors were organized by the household, which, as emphasized especially in Chapters 2, 4, and 5, included aspects of storage, "a matter of concern for everyone" (171) regardless of scale. In other words, storage and its practice are what connects the bonus agricola who builds new storage infrastructure in his villa estate (Ch. 2), the matrona who sets aside a select collection of amphorae stored within a Vesuvian house (Ch. 4), and the wholesale trader who accesses a bulk shipment of amphorae stored within a warehouse at Portus (Ch. 5). While hierarchies abounded across Rome's socioeconomy, "storage's structuring as a family business across contexts" formed "an interlocking web navigated by both farmer and state, rather than a pyramidal state-structure in which each level operated according to distinct principals" (172–73).The book concludes with a concise epilogue (Ch. 7) that summarizes its major contributions, first with regard to the study of ancient socioeconomics. While theories of artifact materiality have grown increasingly prominent in ancient studies in general, such theoretical engagement in the subfield of ancient socioeconomics has remained underdeveloped, despite the growing prominence of archaeological evidence. But, as Van Oyen points out, this engagement with archaeological evidence has been dominated by questions of quantification. The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage demonstrates the potential for artifacts to reveal the qualitative social dimensions of ancient socioeconomics. Second, the book contributes to theoretical discussions of artifact materiality by highlighting the importance of potentiality for understanding human-thing relationships. As many scholars have emphasized, absence, or potential for presence, can play a critical role in the actualization of human-thing relations (e.g., Fowles 2010). The intrinsic potentiality of wine storage makes this point especially clear: "What has yet to become fermented wine fuels ambitious plans" (179). As Van Oyen convincingly demonstrates, storage potentials are historically contingent and therefore warrant study. And third, the book charts a new path for studying the evolution of states and empires. As Van Oyen makes clear in the introductory chapter, the study of storage has too often been employed to substantiate reductionist historical narratives of social evolution. Such histories, while compelling, too often lack context. Van Oyen shows that site-specific and bottom-up study of the peculiarities of individual and collective practice, especially storage practice, can enliven and improve stale models of social evolution.The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage is a well-written and innovative book. Among its greatest strengths is the author's clarity in weaving together various aspects of a complicated subject—the practice of storage. In an attempt to showcase the interconnections between humans and things, relational studies can often find themselves lost in the weeds. Van Oyen avoids this quagmire through creative framing. Like Van Oyen's kaleidoscope model of empire, The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage is itself a kaleidoscope, productively folding together distinct but nonetheless interconnected case studies to present a coherent narrative of Roman storage practices and their role in the manifestation and maintenance of the Roman empire. In doing so, Van Oyen charts a new path for exploring not just ancient Rome but the relationships between humans and things more broadly. While the absence of eastern Mediterranean case studies limits the applicability of the book's specific findings (a critique which the author herself notes 17), scholars of the region will certainly benefit from Van Oyen's approach and general insights regarding Roman storage practice. The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage will be of interest not just to scholars of ancient Rome but also to those curious about how our relationships with everyday things shape history.