Confiscation or Commerce? Spatial Analysis and Economic Relations on the Roman Frontier

This paper examines the potential for GIS to answer questions that are unlikely to be answered with literary and material evidence alone.  One such question is how the Roman military in the provinces interacted with the local economy.  The Roman army must have consumed a great deal of local produce, but it is unclear how they acquired it.  The fragments of literary and documentary evidence that speak to this issue are scarce and scattered across time and space and the archaeological record is biased towards activities that involve durable, especially ceramic, objects.  However, grain would have been moved in sacks or some other light container that would not have added to the cost of transportation, not amphorae.  Nevertheless, these interactions might have left traces in settlement patterns.  Trends in the locations of rural sites relative to potential markets could reveal the nature of economic interaction between those markets and the countryside. The Danube frontier of the Roman Empire is a perfect place to test this hypothesis.  The river was guarded by a series of forts located for strategic reasons, not in response to local economies so we know that any change in rural settlement patterns around them are a reaction to the presence of the forts.  Using the path distance tool in ArcView 10 I measured the effective distance between rural sites and potential markets in the northern Pannonia Inferior, and compared patterns across three centuries of Roman occupation. In the early third century rural producers settled near forts, maximizing their access to multiple markets.  This suggests that they were not being forced to deliver their surplus to a certain place, but had the freedom to choose where to take it.  I argue that the army was not the heavy-handed oppressor of the countryside, but rather its customer.