Ancient Economies

Building on a range of successful area and thematic studies in the past two decades, the ancient economies group is exploring the inter-related dynamics of social intentions and economic behaviour across Eurasia during the first millennia BCE to CE.

About this group

Among the topics of analysis are resource extraction and exploitation (organic and inorganic), production, and exchange, and the institutional framework of production and business (coined silver; Periplus Maris Eyrthraei in the Persian Gulf).  Quantitative and qualitative analyses focus on urban and rural environments, and the interface between settled communities and nomadic pastoralists. The role of transport in the ancient economy is a major focus, especially its administrative aspects; this explores one important facet of the Roman state’s interest and involvement in commercial activity.

Documenting faunal and ceramic finds in Pistiros, Bulgaria (2013)

People

Colin Adams

Colin Adams has recently published:

• (2014), ‘Natural Resources in Roman Egypt: Extraction, Transport and Administration’, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 50 (2013), 265-8;
• (2016), ‘Migration in Roman Egypt: Problems and Possibilities’, in L. de Ligt and L. Tacoma, Migration in the Roman Empire, Leiden: Brill, 264-84; (2017), ‘Nile Grain Transport under the Romans’, in A. K. Bowman and A. Wilson (ed.), Oxford Studies in the Roman Economy 4, Oxford University Press, 175-208;
• (2019), ‘Stimuli for Irrigation, Agriculture, and Quarrying’, in K. Vandorpe (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Graeco-Roman and Late Antique Egypt, Blackwell, 233-50;
• (2023), ‘Pseudo-Arrian, Periplus Maris Erythraei: translation and notes’, in D. G. J. Shipley with C. E. P. Adams, et al., Geographers of the Ancient Greek World: Selected Texts in Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Work on the economy of the Red Sea region is forthcoming in Topoi: ‘The Muziris Papyrus and the Roman State: Infrastructure and Logistics’.

He is presently completing a major study of administration in Roman Egypt, which interfaces with the society and economy of this Roman province. He is editing with Professor John K. Davies, A Cultural History of Business vol. 1: The Classical World. London: Bloomsbury.

Zosia Archibald

Zosia Archibald's forthcoming book is Pistiros in Thrace – an ancient city and emporium in its Eurasian and Mediterranean context (OUP).

Selected recent and forthcoming work includes:

• ‘Macedonia’, in P. Cartledge and P. Christesen, eds., The Oxford History of the Ancient Greek World. Vol.4, OUP (2024, 245-483)
• Ch. 25, Institutions and Urban Maintenance, Cambridge Urban History of Europe, vol 1. The Ancient World, eds. P.J.E. Davies, Ch. Williamson (2025)
• Recently appeared: ‘Northern Greece and the Black Sea’ in: S. von Reden, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Ancient Greek Economy, Cambridge (2022), 94-105.

Laura Donati

Laura Donati works on Roman Slavery and the relationship between law, society and its cultural outputs, focusing especially on moments of tension that are caused by social hierarchies. Her main research interest, then, has obvious ties with economic history and the topic of labour.

Chris Eyre

Chris Eyre has recently published his chapter on Pharaonic Egypt in J.L. Rowlandson, R.S. Bagnall and D.J. Thompson (eds), Slavery and Dependence in Ancient Egypt: Sources in Translation, CUP, 2024, 37-118. Papers dealing with compulsion to labour, and the rural economy are under submission and in preparation as part of long-term research on the micro-economics of the non-coinage, un-commoditised economy of pharaonic Egypt. These are part of the long-term ethnographic approach to pharaonic society, for continuing to develop a project on The Peopling of Pharaonic Egypt supported by a Leverhulme Senior Fellowship was held.

Peter Hommel

Peter Hommel is investigating changing economic and social landscapes in the Mongolian Iron Age in collaboration with the National Museum of Mongolia, University of Michigan and NomadScience Mongolia, with support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Hearth and Home; €174k, 2022-24) and Research England (CAMELS: £38k, 2022-23).

Matthew Ponting

Matthew Ponting studies ancient metals and metalworking, he is a co-PI on the flagship international project:  Rome and the coinages of the Mediterranean, 150 BC-AD 64 (RACOM, 2019-25, funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020, 2.4 million Euros), with Kevin Butcher (U of Warwick) and Adrian Hillier (STFC UKRI).

Matthew is also collaborating with Toby Martin (U of Oxford) on: Silver and Society after Rome, Oxford John Fell Fund (£7.7 k) and with Prof. Uzi Leibner (Hebrew University Jerusalem) on the Khirbet El’Eika excavations (Hellenistic).

Forthcoming publications include:

• ‘The Frome hoard: chemical and lead isotope analysis of three silver-alloy denarii of Carausius’ (with S. Moorhead and S, Minnitt), in The Numismatic Chronicle (2022).
• ‘Mints not mines: a macroscale investigation of Roman silver coinage’ in Internet Archaeology 61 (2023) and ‘Conspicuous by its absence; indigenous Iberian silver in Roman Republican coinage’ (both with J. Wood and K. Butcher).

He is also editing the proceedings of the RACOM conference on Metallurgy in Numismatics, held at The University of Liverpool in April 2022 and published by The Royal Numismatic Society.

Charlotte Van Regenmortel

Charlotte Van Regenmortel works on labour in the Hellenistic economies. She was the PI of the Leverhulme ECF project Labour in the Hellenistic Age: Workers, Wages, and Markets (2020-24, £75,000), in the context of which she co-organized with Zosia Archibald an international workshop on ancient monetization held at Liverpool.

She is currently working on a second monograph on work and labour in the Hellenistic Age. Smaller future targets include a co-authored chapter with Selene Psoma (University of Athens) on the social and economic impact of mercenary pay on the polis, and an invited lecture at the University of Bergamo on the finances of the Hellenistic kingdoms (autumn 2025).

In addition, she takes part in work-in-progress workshops related to the ERC CHANGE project (PI Andrew Meadows, University of Oxford), with a second gathering planned next academic year. She has also delivered an invited lecture at the Institute for Classical Studies (London) on recruitment policies at the Hellenistic courts (2023). Charlotte has recently published a monograph Soldiers, Wages, and the Hellenistic Economies (CUP, 2024), as well as articles on related themes: namely military labour markets (2024); military contracts (2023), and the perception of mercenaries in their home poleis (2022).

Forthcoming outputs include:

• A chapter on Spartan generals hired in Magna Graecia (Bloomsbury, 2024)
• A co-authored chapter (with Jeremy Armstrong, University of Auckland) on war in the city for the Cambridge Urban History of Europe (Cambridge 2024)
• A chapter on military employment in the western Mediterranean (Brill, 2026),
• A chapter in a volume on Hellenistic monetary economies (Liverpool University Press, 2025, eds Lazar, Glenn, Chin).

Sue Stallibrass

Sue Stallibrass is a recently retired senior research fellow who specialises in the integrated study of animal bones and environmental data. Having previously focused on the logistics of production and supply, she is now applying a post-humanist (‘animal turn’) perspective to compare Iron Age and Roman evidence from the personal to the landscape scale.

She has an in-press paper ‘Hunting: Roman peregrinations around central Britain in search of status, glory and salvation’ in R. Collins & M. Symonds (eds) (early 2025) Hadrian’s Wall: New Insights on Frontier Culture, Britannia Monograph, and is currently writing an article comparing the social and economic roles of domestic livestock in rural and military environments to be submitted to TRAJ (Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal) in 2025.

She is a collaborator in the international excavation projects at two Iron Age towns in SE Europe: Pistiros, Bulgaria and Olynthos, northern Greece. She has contributed specialist sections in Archibald’s forthcoming (2025) book Pistiros in Thrace. For Olynthos, she is a contributor to the first excavation monograph: D. Stone et al (eds) forthcoming 2025/6 The Olynthos Project Volume 2: The North Hill and is currently working on the post-excavation material for the second monograph: L. Nevett et al in prep. The Olynthos Project Volume 1: The South Hill.

Magnus Widell

Magnus Widell’s research focuses on the history, languages and texts of ancient Mesopotamia. He is particularly interested in the Sumerian material and in socio-economic, cultural, environmental and agricultural issues of the 3rd millennium BC.

In addition to several more specialised case studies on late 3rd millennium administrative and economic procedures in southern Mesopotamia, Magnus is currently working on a more substantial text edition of the unpublished Neo-Sumerian cuneiform tablets kept at the University of Notre Dame in the United States.