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

ABSTRACT: 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 analyze 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 led by

SUBMITTER: Kase V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9202948 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature