Chapter 8 discusses the archaeological evidence for cultivation choices made on provincial estates, trying to establish when large-scale arboriculture was a viable and appealing choice for growers. The case study of two farms in southern France suggests that even for modest colonial famers cultivating the grapevine and making wine for the market were attractive commercial choices. The fact that these cultivated a combination of wild and cultivated vines might be indicative of the limited opportunities they had in accessing plant cuttings and young vines from nurseries. The chapter concludes by comparing the Iberian and Gallic evidence with that available for Roman Britain, a region for which rich archaeobotanical datasets exists. The Roman era increased the range of plant foods consumed and allowed the acclimatization of certain plants into Britain; here, large-scale fruit cultivation seems to have occurred on larger estates, whose proprietors had access to capital, technical knowledge and markets with sufficient aggregate demand. Roman Britain shows quite clearly that the overall pattern in the distant provinces was not so different from the heartland of Roman agriculture.

This chapter focuses on grafting of fruit trees and the development of new cultivars of fruits, exploring the ways in which grafting came to occupy a prominent metaphorical and symbolic place in elite intellectual discourse. It is argued that such ideological constructs ultimately rested on the fact that grafting is a fundamental technique in arboriculture (since propagation of plants to maintain them true to type occurs by grafting). Grafting lent itself easily to be used as the symbol of the ingenuity and control humans could exercise over nature, but also as a possible source of hubris. The emphasis literary texts give to the involvement of prominent Roman families in the development and naming of new fruit varieties suggests that this symbolic discourse was rooted in practical considerations about the economic implications of running agricultural estates for market-oriented arboriculture.

Chapter 1 investigates how in the late Republic private gardens came to symbolize the qualities and cultural aspirations of their owners, essentially becoming a means for self-representation. This ideological development was the outcome of the blurring of boundaries between private and public architecture in terms of social and political significance. The chpater then focuses on two grand examples of garden planning that brought the symbolic use of green spaces into the political discourse and political competition: Lucullus’ Horti and Pompey’s Porticus. Plants displayed in a garden could convey specific meanings; when such plants were exotica imported from newly conquered lands, they spoke also of territorial conquests. The multi-layered cultural complexity of late Republican garden spaces was the basis on which horticulture and plant transplanting grew as an elite, ideologically charged activity.

Chapter 3 argues that the Augustan era was crucial for the development of commercial arboriculture and horticulture more generally. The interest of Augustan intellectuals in writing works on horticulture, the introduction of new fruits into Italy, the appearance of garden tombs and of specific terms to indicate types of cultivations, the wider application of water-lifting technology to irrigation, all point to a considerable development of horticulture and intensification of cultivations in the late first century BC and the early first century AD.While horticultural exploitation in Rome’s suburbium changed gear during the early principate, the chapter argues that further stimulus to investigate horticultural matters came also from land assignments to veterans in provincial territories and from wealthy landowners who were acquiring an increasing number of properties overseas. Identifying the best varieties to be cultivated commercially in the specific environmental conditions present in the provincial territories must have been of great interest to the farmer-colonists as it was for the Romanized local elites investing in cash crop cultivations.

This chapter posits the processes that favored the rise of ranked polities in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age. We put forth the Supra Regional Interaction Hypothesis to explain how elite households were able to consolidate political power through their involvement in boat building, timber extraction, long-distance exchange, and raiding for slaves with the goal of financing trading expeditions to secure coveted metals. These elite households were organized into supra regional political sodalities that controlled political power, surplus production, debt, exchange, feasts, and warfare as well as ritual and religious means. We hypothesize that this sodality functioned as types of “secret society” as described by Hayden (2018). Thus, in order secure boats for long-distance exchange of metals and other exotica, the said political sodalities established trade confederacies, alliances, and colonies between rich agro-pastoral regions (more coercive) and regions rich in timber (more cooperative) – the latter ones famous for its rock art. They established transregional networks that linked and controlled interaction and exchange between regions with varied forms of environments and social organizations, spanning from more coercive to cooperative social settings (Feinman 2017). In doing so, they could control labour, raw materials, skills, and surplus production over large areas. Moreover, we theorize that aggrandizing households sponsoring boat building and timber extraction also reaped many benefits stemming from the capturing of slaves. We also claim that the rock was made and controlled by members of “secret societies” and that the abundance of rock art sites in more cooperative timber-rich regions should be seen as an outcome of political/ritual interactions with elites from more coercive areas (Figure 4.1).

In this chapter, I will argue that trade and exchange, whether civilised or uncivilised, have to be understood by developing a theory of value. Marx’s well-known distinction between use value and exchange value was predicated on whether the product of alienated labour confronted the producer as ‘something alien, as a power independent of the producers’ (Marx and Engels 1970: 16). In the passages on commodity fetishism in The German Ideology, the laws of the commodity market are compared to the superstition of the savage who fashions a fetish with his own hand and then falls down and worships it (Arthur 1970: 17). Extrapolating to the remote past that the product of our labour continues to confront us as something alien has a certain relevance for understanding long-term histories of inequality.

In many European regions, neolithization processes are linked with ritual economies that include the construction of megalithic monuments. As paleo-environmental and archaeological archives of the North Central European and South Scandinavian Funnel Beaker societies have proven to be excellent, the reconstruction of social processes linked with the introduction of horti- and agriculture and with the construction of first monuments displays a well-researched example for the investigation of long-distance contacts. It becomes obvious that long-distance contacts of these societies indicate different purposes in different stages of their economic and social development.

The Bronze Age was a period of premodern globalization across a number of parameters, which may deserve the term ‘bronzization’ – a multi-scalar process of bronze-led connectedness across a macro-region in Afro-Eurasia (Vandkilde 2016, 2017b). The onset of bronzization dates to c. 2000 bce, a time-point that marks the first historical threshold: bronze was now used over much of the Bronze Age macro-region (Figure 13.1). Another tipping point occurred c. 1600 bce, expediting the full implementation and floruit of bronze-based culture, whilst a phenomenal shrinkage began c. 1200 bce, which marked the beginning of the end of bronzization. Bronze Age connectedness in Afro-Eurasia emerged from innumerable transports of goods, encounters, local responses to the transculturally exotic, and the surge in the economy, creativity, and innovation that characterized the entire period. Local histories thus became linked through encounters of neutral, diplomatic or conflicting nature: intersecting interaction spheres may have been the fundamental building blocks of the vast grid of bronzization (Figure 13.2).

The Bronze Age was a time of long-distance exchange. The introduction of the folding stool and the single-edged razor into Southern Scandinavia, as well as the testimony of chariot use during the Nordic Bronze Age Period II (1500–1300 bc), give evidence of transfer of ideas from the Mediterranean to the North. Amber, from the North to the Mediterranean and even beyond, and beads of Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass from Nordic Bronze Age burials, provide physical evidence of long-distance exchange.

The archaeology of Eurasia has undergone a tremendous change in the last thirty years. The chronology was completely revised by using calibrated radiocarbon dates. The radiocarbon revolution was already on the horizon in the 1970s (Renfrew 1973), but the whole potential for Prehistoric archaeology emerged from calibration since the 1990s. And this changed a lot. The Neolithic period started much earlier than previously thought; the Bronze Age in Central Europe was also dated much earlier. Perusing archaeology handbooks from the 1980s, the changes in our knowledge become clear. For the first time Prehistoric archaeology was able to date archaeological findings directly by scientific methods. It was no longer necessary to speculate about the time necessary for the formation of archaeological layers in tell settlements. Prehistoric archaeology was no longer dependent upon the Egyptian or the Mesopotamian chronologies. Yet, the revised chronologies make it necessary to reassess the whole framework of interpretations. New finds were the motor of new research. In 1991, a mummy was found in the Ötztaler Alps near the Hauslabjoch. The archaeological importance of the find attracted detailed research on the life and the death of ‘Ötzi’. An end to this research is still not in sight (Fleckinger 2011). The first dating of the mummy to the Early Bronze Age in the second millennium bce had to be revised after the radiocarbon dates. Ötzi died in the last quarter of the fourth millennium bce. This surprising date triggered a complete revision of the alpine Late Neolithic and Copper Age (de Marinis 1992: 389ff.). Firstly concerned was the Italian Remedello culture, but then all other cultures in the regions as well. The new chronology also touched upon the huge number of anthropomorphic stelae in the alpine region (Casini 1994; Philippon 2002; Casini and Fossati 2004). Whole groups of metal objects like the halberds were re-dated. Their development did not take place during a short period in the second millennium but instead during a very long one starting from the middle of the fourth millennium bce (Horn 2014). Actually, the revision of the regional chronology was part of a comprehensive rearrangement of chronologies in Europe. This concerned especially the chronology of the third and fourth millennia bce.