Invisible Labour in Antiquity

Labour in Antiquity, ranging from commerce and trade to physical labour, slavery, and the activity of subalterns, has long been studied, and the notion that certain elements of labour are not immediately visible in source material is widely accepted. Even so, the concept of ‘invisible labour’, that is, labour hidden from the view of either ancient peoples or modern scholars, has, up to now, been very little studied. This volume aims to address the balance by examining how the quotidian behaviours and strategies of ‘invisible’ ancient people shaped economic life, and vice versa, and by exploring new ways to account for the invisible, both empirically and methodologically, through an analysis of environmental, social, and cultural factors. The scholars writing in this volume focus on different key trends. Some address the impact of practices determined by environmental or social factors, such as caravan trading, religious practice, transhumanism, and maritime commerce, on economies at a micro- and macro-level. Others examine the effect that daily routines of the invisible, including peasants, nomads, daily labourers, and vendors, had on local economies and the formation of broader socio-economic structures. Bridging classics, archaeology, history, and the natural sciences, the chapters gathered here offer important new insights into work that is often hardly visible in the evidence but that drove the economies of the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western Asia in antiquity.

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

1. Introduction: Invisible Labour and Ancient Economy
Nathanael Andrade and Rubina Raja
2. The Palmyrene Trade and the Nomads
Udo Hartmann
3. Ground Up Spices: Investigating the Role of the Marginalized and Unseen in the Distribution, Processing, and Consumption of Spices and Aromatics during the Roman Imperial Period
Matthew A. Cobb
4. Invisible Labour in Hellenistic Central Asia and North-west India (Third to the First Centuries BC)
Omar Coloru
5. River, Rain, and Sea: Physical and Behavioural Ephemerality in Peninsular South Asia in the First Millenium AD
Rebecca Darley
6. Economic Choices and Naval Transport between the Middle Euphrates and Persian Gulf
Kai Ruffing
7. Wetlands and their Plant Resources: Flax and Hemp
Annalisa Marzano
8. Cultural Capital and the Economy in Roman Egypt
Micaela Langellotti
9. The Work of Cultural Capital: Labour and a Coinage Tradition
Lara Fabian
10.‘Tribes’ and Invisible Labour in Roman Africa
Stéphanie Guédon
11. The Economy of paideia in the Hauran (Southern Syria) in Roman Times
Julia Hoffmann-Salz
12. Twice Overlooked: Enslaved Women Workers in the Roman Latin West
Miriam J. Groen-Vallinga
13. Harvesting in the Shadows: Farmers, Power, and Economy in Late Antique Syria
Michael J. Decker
14. (Re)Constructing Rural Lifeways of North-Eastern Gaul in the Sixth Century AD
Cam Grey