Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

population; settlement; demographic decline? 325
complex, prosperous societies, people use wealth in the pursuit of greater
living space and in the purchase of more than one house; while in straitened
circumstances, they retrench, housing, for example, elderly parents
and young adult offspring within the family home. Similar variables may
well have applied in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Indeed, there is
some archaeological evidence to support this, in the Roman dwellings
found to have been crudely subdivided in post-Roman times (see, for
example, that in Fig. 6). 19 Some of these remains, often dismissed in the
past as ‘squatter occupation’, may show the descendants of the original
owners living in a more densely packed and less comfortable way than their
ancestors. Charting such subtle but important shifts in the practices of
society is essential if we are to document demographic change at all reliably
from the archaeological evidence; but they will certainly not show up
in field-survey, and they may well be missed even in excavation.
The very real problem with the evidence is readily demonstrated from
the example of Italy. Large parts of the peninsula have been surveyed in
intensive and often sophisticated field-surveys over the last forty years, and
many of the recent surveys have been specifically interested in discovering
early medieval settlements – but, for the most part, they have drawn a complete,
or almost complete, blank for the late sixth to the eighth century. If
the archaeological record was straightforward, there would be no one living
in huge tracts of early medieval Italy. This is self-evidently nonsense: there
must have been people living in these areas, and we just cannot find them.
And since this is so, we are scarcely in a strong position to begin speculating
as to how many of them there were.
It is not only a close examination of the archaeological evidence that
urges caution before producing too confident an account of post-Roman
demographic collapse. When (for the first time in the Middle Ages) we have
documents that allow local population estimates to be made, the so-called
polyptychs of ninth-century Carolingian church estates (most famously
that of 806/29 from the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the Île de
France), these reveal remarkably large rural populations. 20 The tradition
amongst economic historians of the Middle Ages has been to play this
down by describing these ecclesiastical estates as exceptional pockets of
dense population within a much emptier and undocumented landscape.
But this argument smacks a bit of preconceptions and special pleading
(designed perhaps to highlight a later, eleventh- and twelfth-century economic
and demographic upturn). If instead we accept that both Roman
and Carolingian Europe supported large rural populations, there is less
room left for the traditional model of what happened to population in
19 Nador: Anselmino et al. (1989). For other examples (at Carthage, Ptolemais and Déhès): Ellis
(1985); Ward-Perkins et al.(1986); Sodini et al.(1980).
20 Lot (1921); and, for further discussion and bibliography: Doehaerd (1971) 85–113; Rouche (1983).
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