Population densities in Roman-Age Europe?

Wed Jun 4 22:09:23 UTC 2014

According to Shchukin, Kazanski and Sharov (Des Goths aux Huns, Le nord de la Mer Noire au Bas-Empire et a l'epoque des Grandes Migrations 2006, p. 38), the population density for the Chernyakhov culture in periods C2 and C3 was high. In the Uman' region on the middle Dnieper, 1 to 1.2 persons is estimated for every square kilometre; for the whole territory of the Chernyakhov culture in the Ukraine alone (250,000 square kilometres), this would represent around 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants for the eastern part of the Chernyahkov cultural zone (to the east of the Dniester). I have no statistics for that part of the culture which occupied land outside of the latterday Ukraine.

It should be further noted that in 1960, about 716 Chernyakhov sites were known in the Ukraine; today the number of known sites is between 2,000 and 5,000. According to Magomedov (Chernyakhovskaja kul'tura, problema etnosa 2001, p. 181), only around 200 settlements and about 120 gravefields have been fully excavated at the time of his writing.

It would seem reasonable to assume that the actual number of inhabitants in the Chernyakhov cultural area was considerably higher than 300,000, given that most likely not all settlements and gravefields have yet been found, and most of the known ones have not yet been even fully excavated, and the estimated numbers for a considerable tract of land (parts of present-day Romania, Poland and Byelorussia) are not included here. See the bibliographic references in the aforementioned works for the relevant archaeological literature.

I might add here that while most scholars agree now that the Goths are to be linked to the Chernyakhov culture, there is some debate about the extent to which the culture is Gothic. The extreme view that the culture largely represents an indigenous people controlled by a Gothic elite (e.g. Kulikowski's Rome's Gothic Wars 2007) finds little support in the archaeological data (which Kulikowski ignores, not surprisingly, given that most of it was published in Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian). The area between the Dniester in the west and the Dnieper in the east, and the Black Sea to the south and the Pripyat in the north was almost completely depopulated in the second century AD (see, for example, the map in Magomedov p. 132, or Lebydynsky's Les Sarmates 2002, amongst other more recent works), and those who filled this vacuum in the course of the third century were mainly bearers of the Wielbark and to a lesser extent Przeworski cultures, the former
 normally linked to the Gutones (the Goths on the southern Baltic shore) and the latter to the Vandals. The culture in this area then would appear to have been solidly East Germanic, if not exclusively Gothic. According to Magomedov's aforementioned study, the contribution from the Sarmato-Alans and the Carpi was minimal: he estimates for the entire Chernyakhov culture, the Sarmato-Alanic contribution is about one percent. Non-Germanic elements appear largely at the periphery, e.g., in the extreme north-east, where elements of the Kiev culture, now commonly assumed to be the culture of the Proto-Slavic people the Veneti mentioned in Jordanes), overlap with remains of the Chernyakhov culture. Likewise, a strip running along the north shore of the Black Sea shows Sarmato-Alanic features.

Edmund

On Wednesday, June 4, 2014 12:25:25 AM, "Marja Erwin marja-e at riseup.net [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Can anyone recommend studies of the population densities of parts of Roman-Age Europe, especially outside the Empire?

I’ve been looking around, particularly wrt the Goths and the Alamanni, but had very little success. Studies starting from field survey would be best, but studies starting from the sizes of the leading towns would be something concrete too, and only counting the x/area leading settlements avoids issues with whether small towns were agricultural settlements or not.

Heather & Matthews 1991 give the sizes of the leading Chernyakhov towns between the Pruth and Dniestr, which works out to 60 hectares for the largest 2 towns in 46,000 km2.

As a reference point, Millett 1990 gives the sizes of the leading Roman British towns, which works out to 496 hectares for the largest 6 towns in about 150,000 km2. I would pair some bringing a total of about 538 hectares. He estimates somewhere around 3.7 million, I’d probably suggest about 3 million there.

Anyway, a similar relationship between the leading towns and the total population would suggest somewhere between 300 thousand and 400 thousand people between the Prut and Dniestr, and between 6 and 8 per km2. But better evidence for more areas would be helpful.

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