Scientific meeting "Cultivation in Antiquity"

École française de Rome, 9 january 2024, 9 h-18 h
Piazza Navona 62, conference room

Scientific meeting organised by Marine Bretin-Chabrol and Maëlys Blandenet, with the support from the EFR and the ANR (ANR-18-CE27-0002AgroCCol).

Thanks to the development of agrarian archaeology and archaeobotany, today’s knowledge of farming practices in Antiquity is no longer based solely on textual sources such as the works of the "Latin agronomists", the didactic poems of Hesiod or Virgil, or the philosophical treatises of Theophrastus, with a few images borrowed from an eclectic iconographic tradition. Nowadays, the lessons taught in these books are no longer supposed to mirror definite practices, valid for the whole of the Greco-Roman world and the Mediterranean basin. On the contrary, the multiplication of types of source allows us to refine our knowledge of the specific context in which each precept is put forward, and to better measure the degree of error, artistic interpretation or ideological voluntarism that each author brings to his work.

Since 2018, the ANR AgroCCol project has been bringing together a multidisciplinary team of philologists, botanists, historians, archaeologists and archaeobotanists to study the relationship between texts and the cultivation of cereals and legumes.

Our scientific meeting will give the AgroCCol team the opportunity to present the results of its work on the occasion of the official publication of the "Cultivating in Antiquity: Cereals and Pulses" website. This website offers a digital edition of a Greek and Latin corpus on field crops. We will examine the methodological challenges and scientific contributions of the digital edition of this technical corpus, and the prospects it offers in terms of the identification of cultivated plants in Antiquity, ethnobotany and eco-criticism.

However, the research carried out by our team is part of a much wider movement to renew studies of agricultural practices in Antiquity through interdisciplinary approaches. We therefore wanted to broaden the scope of our research by inviting colleagues whose expertise in different disciplines and fields (didactic poetry, art history, archaeology of Roman villae, economic history of the Roman world) has encouraged us to explore this subject in greater depth. Each of the papers presented will focus on the relationship between these different disciplines and ancient texts dealing with agriculture, on the way in which they question them or use them as sources, and on any problems raised by this interaction.

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