This focused volume is the result of a 2016 workshop held as part of the RurLand project. Given the immense detail of the two French-language monographs resultant from that project, this edited volume provides a welcome access point to the wealth of scholarship taking place in northern Gaul. Storage is very much a hot topic, with a 2020 volume from Astrid Van Oyen on The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage and further prehistoric studies in progress. Unlike broader studies, this volume has a strong focus on quantification and aims to move from archaeology to economic history.
The volume consists of an introduction, six main chapters and a conclusion. Many of the authors have conducted recent detailed regional studies of rural settlement, and a key benefit of the book is the bringing together of scholarship taking place in Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The introduction by Martin reviews the historiography of storage studies, setting recent Mediterranean-focused work within the context of prehistoric and Roman frontier studies, before making the claim that ‘trying to assess the capacity of storage buildings is at the moment the only way towards any attempt at quantifying agrarian production’ (p. 7). Other proxies are, of course, available, including mills, drying-ovens, field systems, agent-based modelling, palynological reconstructions and archaeobotanical evidence for crop-husbandry practices, but this volume tends to stick closely to its focus on storage.
Blöck presents a model for the calculation of granary capacity on the basis of early modern historical evidence and applies it to the Villa Bad Rappenau ‘Maueräcker’ and Villa Biberist ‘Spitalhof’. This reveals high storage capacities and associated agricultural areas of over 600 ha. Salido Domínguez argues against such quantitative calculations of granary capacity and associated farmland, using archaeobotanical studies to point to the diversity of crops stored and their stages of processing (clean grain or spikelets). Whilst it is fantastic to see archaeobotanical evidence being utilised in this way, some basic tabulations of results or a comparative graph would have been very useful here. The call for quantification is then taken up again by Martin, who helpfully summarises the key information needed to make such a calculation in table 3.3: type of grain stored, surface area, grain depth and loss during harvest and storage. Repetition of points of discussion is frequent, but this does at least highlight the contentiousness of attempts at quantification.
These revised calculation methods are adopted to various degrees by the authors of the chapters in part 2. Bossard presents a synthesis of evidence for rural storage from Iron Age northern Gaul, drawing on the Age du Fer INRAP database and several regional studies. The focus is on the form and number of storage structures rather than capacity. Through several distribution maps, this chapter shows the move from silos to above-ground storage in the mid-third century BC, the presence of specialist cereal-processing sites in La Tène finale, as well as new evidence for batteries of storage structures at proto-urban sites. Returning to the Roman period, Ferdiere et al. enrich a previous dataset of 188 granaries (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01812097) and present revised calculations to scale down previous statements, but nevertheless highlight the presence of large above-ground storage structures in Roman Gaul. Finally, Martin looks to the non-villa landscape of the Batavian countryside, arguing that the case for grain surpluses has been overstated in previous work. Instead, he suggests that large granaries had more to do with integration into the Roman social system. These chapters show the importance of revisiting quantification studies and that consideration of storage structures can go beyond economics to discuss social change.
In concluding the volume, Reddé broadens out the discussion to include military and urban granaries, the role of the countryside in supplying the frontiers and the challenges of linking together the producer and consumer through time.
In bringing together summaries of extensive regional studies, this volume will act as a key entry point to a wealth of literature. The volume certainly meets the aim of introducing evidence from Gaul to a previously Mediterranean-centric discussion of storage in the Roman world. But rather than show that agrarian production can be quantified through granaries alone (p. 4), it reveals the need to integrate storage structures within more multi-stranded regional studies and to consider storage as a socio-economic phenomenon. It also highlights the challenges of dating structures and establishing their stored products. Links between the impact of storage on diet, temporality and community are sadly missing; but surely this volume will act as a bridge between the data-rich north-western provinces and such work taking place elsewhere in the Roman world.
It is a shame that storage structures in Britain are almost entirely neglected. The work of the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain project on storage is described as ‘superficial’ (p. 5) and archaeobotanical studies as ‘very scarce’ (p. 26). The relatively low occurrence of specialist storage structures in the countryside of Roman Britain contra military granaries is an interesting point of comparison with northern Gaul. The understanding of aisled barns in Britain versus Ferdiere's le type à piliers internes et plusieurs nefs requires further attention and there is also clearly a pressing need for synthetic study of Iron Age settlements in Britain, with the study of Iron Age grain silos barely undertaken for decades.
