The project’s results indicate that a landscape once dominated by small, family-run, farms, each cultivating small plots of land, gradually transformed through the three phases of the Roman imperial period (Early, 30 BC-AD 120: 205 sites; Mid, AD 120-260: 174 sites; Late, AD 260-440: 146 sites) into one featuring large agricultural estates involved in extensive farming practices. In light of historical records it seems likely that affluent investors bought up much of the land of failing smallholders, expanding the capacity of their own agricultural enterprises and leasing out properties to poorer farmers. Local wealth, power, and influence became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of elite landowners. Yet despite this process, small low-status sites remained the most abundant class of rural habitation even in the Late Imperial period and many middle-ranking sites endured without a break in occupation even into Late Antique times (AD 440-700: 77 sites in total). The resilience of wide sections of the rural community, even in the face of external threats from Longobards and others, should not be underestimated, but significantly a considerable proportion of Tuscania’s hinterland of cultivated fields had reverted to scrub and woodland by the Late Antique period.

Chapter 3 argues that the Augustan era was crucial for the development of commercial arboriculture and horticulture more generally. The interest of Augustan intellectuals in writing works on horticulture, the introduction of new fruits into Italy, the appearance of garden tombs and of specific terms to indicate types of cultivations, the wider application of water-lifting technology to irrigation, all point to a considerable development of horticulture and intensification of cultivations in the late first century BC and the early first century AD.While horticultural exploitation in Rome’s suburbium changed gear during the early principate, the chapter argues that further stimulus to investigate horticultural matters came also from land assignments to veterans in provincial territories and from wealthy landowners who were acquiring an increasing number of properties overseas. Identifying the best varieties to be cultivated commercially in the specific environmental conditions present in the provincial territories must have been of great interest to the farmer-colonists as it was for the Romanized local elites investing in cash crop cultivations.