Population densities in Roman-Age Europe?

[Marja Erwin marja-e@riseup.net [gothic-l]]

I KNOW we can’t rely on documentary and literary sources for the ancient world. I KNOW about the disputes over Polybius' supposed army sizes and Augustus’ census and who it included. I would suggest reading Saskia Hin about that, she has a short paper on the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics site, and a longer book which I can’t afford.

This is why I was talking about archaeological evidence: field survey, the sizes of the leading towns, etc.

This would require calibration, that is comparison with other regions and/or later periods where we can compare documentary and literary sources with archaeological evidence. England has relatively good wide-ranging records compared with much of the rest of the medieval and early modern world. That would include Domesday in 1086, some tax surveys from the 1370s, manorial records, etc. That gives one of the few near-consensus estimates, of about 2.5 million in the 1370s, with figures for the towns and counties as well as the total. Although estmates range from less than 4 million to 6 million if people try to work back to the early 1340s.

And what is so implausable about 3 million in Roman Britain? There was extensive settlement, there were large towns, etc. There were about 70,000 people in the 6 leading towns [not pairing, using the typical density of 150 people/ha] in 300 as opposed to something like 56,000 in the 6 leading towns [not pairing, using the tax fgures x1.5 to account for children under 14] in 1377. There is no reason that earlier populations can’t exceed later ones. Michael Jones, 1996, argues that the combination of soil depletion and climate change caused catastrophic famine and popuation decline in post-Roman Britain, and the soil depletion could limit populations since. Massive soil erosion, the so-called “Younger Fill,” has been associated with the Roman period elsewhere in Europe and the Mediterranean.

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