Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Figure 8. Map of Roman Italy.
followed the practices of their Neolithic ancestors. Between about 4000
and 1000 bc, agriculture spread from the best sites used by the first farmers
to steeper slopes and hard-to-work valley bottom clays.
Iron came into widespread use about 500 bc. Before then only the
wealthy and the military had access to metal tools. More abundant and
cheaper than bronze, iron was hard, durable, and readily formed to fit over
wood. Farmers began fitting plows and spades with iron blades to carve
through topsoil and down into denser subsoil. Most of Italy remained
forested around 300 bc, but new metal tools allowed extensive deforestation
over the next several centuries.
When Romulus founded Rome in about 750 bc, he divided up the new
state into two-acre parcels, a size his followers could cultivate themselves.
The soils of central Italy were famously productive when the Roman
graveyard of empires 57