A Quantitative Approach on Latin Occupational Epigraphy

Varga, Rada

doi:10.14795/j.v6i4.463

Cited by 1 publication

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“…The HISCO groups are well suited to capture the vertical stratification of a society, with individual categories referring to specific types of work activities, group 0 representing the jobs requiring specialized training and high skill set level, while group 9 represents mostly manual low-and unskilled labor [57]. Although the HISCO categories were originally designed to capture occupations from the Early Modern period, they were applied in a synchronic study of occupations in the Roman world, despite some category incongruencies [58][59][60]. On the other hand, Harris'…”

Section: Occupations and Occupational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Division of labor, specialization and diversity in the ancient Roman cities: A quantitative approach to Latin epigraphy

Heřmánková¹,

Kaše²

2022

Preprint

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Recent empirical studies on the division of labor in modern cities indicate a complex web of relationships between sectoral specialization of cities and their productivity on one hand and sectoral diversification and resilience on the other. Emerging scholarly consensus suggests that ancient urbanism has more in common with modern urban development than previously thought. We explore whether modern trends in urban division of labor apply to the cities of the Western Roman Empire from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE. We introduce analyses based on occupational data extracted from a large body of Latin epigraphic evidence by computer-assisted text-mining, subsequently mapped onto a dataset of ancient Roman cities. We detect a higher frequency of occupation terms on inscriptions from cities than from rural areas and identify an accumulation of tertiary sector occupations in large cities. The temporal dimension of epigraphic data allows us to study aspects of the division of labor diachronically and to detect trends in the data in a four centuries-long period of Roman imperial history. Our analyses reveal an overall decrease in the frequency of occupational terms between the first half and second half of the third century CE; the maximum frequency of occupational terms shifts over time from large cities to medium and small towns, and finally, rural areas. Our results regarding the specialization and diversity of cities and their respective impact on productivity and resilience remain inconclusive, possibly as a result of the socio-economic bias of Latin inscriptions and insufficient representativeness of the data. Yet, we believe that our formalized approach to the research problem opens up new avenues for research, both in respect to the economic history of the Roman Empire and to the current trends in the science of cities.

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Section: Occupations and Occupational Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%