African producers – olive estates in this part of the empire dominated production through most of the third and fourth centuries. Later, after , North African dominance was broken by the East: in the later fifth and sixth centuries the Aegean, southern Asia Minor (Turkey), Syria and Palestine became major exporters of wine and olive oil, and containers from Africa show a dramatically reduced presence on Mediterranean markets. Behind these broad movements the prosperity of individual regions rose and fell depending on how effectively they could organise the production and transport of particular goods, and on the quality of those goods. The empire included many regions that had a reputation for exceptional fertility.
Campania in Italy, Sicily, the Fayum in Egypt, Galilee, Byzacium (Tunisia), southern Gaul (called Gallia Narbonensis), and Baetica (southern Spain) were all among the most densely settled or wealthiest parts of the empire, according to writers like Strabo and Pliny. The best kinds of wine came from Campania. Sicily and Byzacium exported large quantities of wheat to Rome. Galilee was densely cultivated (‘every inch of the soil has been cultivated by the inhabitants’, wrote the historian Josephus), and Spanish olive oil came mainly from numerous estates ( fundi ) along the banks of the river Guadalquivir in the south of Spain.
On the other hand, large expanses of Roman territory were in a much less advanced state. For example, transhumance* was widespread in the countryside of Numidia (modern Algeria). These pastoral and semi-nomadic communities were often on the move, carrying their oven-shaped huts (called mapalia ) with them. As Roman estates expanded in North Africa, the pastures of those communities were drastically reduced and their movements more tightly regulated.
Even in Spain the north was much less developed, and inhabited largely by a Celtic-speaking peasantry that lived in hilltop villages called castella . When we think of the Roman Empire, we should never forget these differences. We should also be careful not to imagine that because this was the ‘ancient’ world, their forms of cultural and economic life were necessarily backward or primitive. On the contrary, diversified