Chapter 8 - Viticulture versus Arboriculture

Summary

Chapter 8 discusses the archaeological evidence for cultivation choices made on provincial estates, trying to establish when large-scale arboriculture was a viable and appealing choice for growers. The case study of two farms in southern France suggests that even for modest colonial famers cultivating the grapevine and making wine for the market were attractive commercial choices. The fact that these cultivated a combination of wild and cultivated vines might be indicative of the limited opportunities they had in accessing plant cuttings and young vines from nurseries. The chapter concludes by comparing the Iberian and Gallic evidence with that available for Roman Britain, a region for which rich archaeobotanical datasets exists. The Roman era increased the range of plant foods consumed and allowed the acclimatization of certain plants into Britain; here, large-scale fruit cultivation seems to have occurred on larger estates, whose proprietors had access to capital, technical knowledge and markets with sufficient aggregate demand. Roman Britain shows quite clearly that the overall pattern in the distant provinces was not so different from the heartland of Roman agriculture.