Population densities in Roman-Age Europe?

Thu Jun 5 08:41:25 UTC 2014

  Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (NH III.28) wrote about the population of recently annexed Galicia and Asturia, in the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. He said that the northern Galicians number 166.000 free heads, and were divided in 16 populi; the southern Galicians were 285.000 divided in 24 civitates, and the Astures were 240.000 divided in 22 populi. That is, some 691.000 free persons living in a hilly area of some 75.000 sq km, so a little less than some 10 inh./sq km, and some 10,000 persons per “tribe”. 

Just for the record, that people were usual western European Iron Age folks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castro_culture), living in fortified hill forts of small size, rarelly larger than 2 ha except in the south, where there were some oppida. Their economy was based mainly in agriculture and animal husbandry, although they still complemented that with recolection of acorns, hunting and fishing. We also know that Galicians and Asturians served in Cartaginian armies as soldiers of fortune, and later as auxiliares with Rome.

---In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, <edmundfairfax at ...> wrote :

 A population density of 1-1.2 person per km2 is somewhat misleading in this case: most of the Chernyakhov cultural settlements clustered along waterways, leaving more interior stretches unpopulated. According to the two sources I mentioned in the previous email, there was a large no-man's-land running right across the zone. If only inhabited zones are considered, then, of course, a much higher density would result.

 Edmund

 On Wednesday, June 4, 2014 7:57:23 PM, "Marja Erwin marja-e at ... [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 Thanks. Those sound like useful sources, though 1.2 people/km2 isn’t high  by central or western European standards.

On Jun 4, 2014, at 6:09 PM, Edmund Fairfax edmundfairfax at ... mailto:edmundfairfax at ... [gothic-l] <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> 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 theVeneti 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 ... mailto:marja-e at ... [gothic-l]" <gothic-l at yahoogroups.com mailto: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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