The land of Caesar: Geography and economy of the i.. (LanCRAM)
The land of Caesar: Geography and economy of the imperial properties in Roman Asia Minor
(LanCRAM)
Start date: Sep 1, 2014,
End date: Aug 31, 2016
PROJECT
FINISHED
The LanCRAM project aims at studying the geographical distribution and the economic, social and political impact of the properties of the Roman emperors in Asia Minor. These consisted of villas, landed estates, pastureland, woods, mines and quarries. This immense richness was a key element for the maintenance of the position of supreme power, since the emperor could use it to confer social status to individuals or to perform benefactions in favour of communities. Furthermore, imperial properties produced undeniable economic repercussions on the regions where they had a considerable extension. Since their owner was both the head of the empire and a global economic player, we can trace a tendency to trans-regional uniformity in the patterns of exploitation and a positive effect on the integration of rural areas in the political and economic system of the empire. No major survey of the available documentation has been produced since the beginning of the 20th century and many questions about the development and use of the properties remain unanswered. The project aims at filling this gap in three ways. (1) The development of a powerful online relational database of all published sources for the proposed area; every record will contain geodata and will be related to separate databases of all known persons (administrators, peasants etc.), regions and bibliographic references. (2) The preparation of a monograph on the geography and the economy of the imperial properties in Asia Minor from Augustus to Diocletian (27 BC-AD 284). This region is one of the best documented for the Roman period and offers a variety of geographical, cultural and administrative contexts that allow to study the subject from a multidisciplinary perspective; (3) the organisation of two workshops and an international conference together with experts of other regions in order to open the database to different areas of the empire and provide for the first time a general overview of the documentation.
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