Economic Expansion

The empire had a substantial economic infrastructure of harbours, mines, quarries, brickyards, olive oil factories, etc. Wheat, wine and olive-oil were traded and consumed in huge quantities, and they came mainly from Spain, the Gallic provinces, North Africa, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Italy, where conditions were best for these crops. Liquids like wine and olive oil were transported in containers called ‘amphorae’. The fragments and sherds of a very large number of these survive (Monte Testaccio in Rome is said to contain the remnants of over million vessels!), and it has been possible for archaeologists to reconstruct the precise shapes of these containers, tell us what they carried, and say exactly where they were made by examining the clay content and matching the finds with clay pits throughout the Mediterranean.

In this way we can now say with some confidence that Spanish olive oil, to take just one example, was a vast commercial enterprise that reached its peak in the years - . The Spanish olive oil of this period was mainly carried in a container called ‘Dressel ’ (after the archaeologist who first established its form). If finds of Dressel are widely scattered across sites in the Mediterranean, this suggests that Spanish olive oil circulated very widely indeed. By using such evidence (the remains of amphorae of different kinds and their ‘distribution maps’), archaeologists are able to show that Spanish producers succeeded in capturing markets for olive oil from their