Paolo Tedesco’s new book on the peasantry of late antique North Africa is an important contribution to debate on an essential (but often overlooked or underestimated) facet of ancient society. Peasants are much in vogue in Classical Studies, not least as the result of the work of Kim Bowes and the Roman Peasant Project.[1] For North Africa, we also have Leslie Dossey’s excellent book.[2] A key characteristic of the work of both Bowes and Dossey concerns the way they use archaeology as a tool to document the lives of the less powerful rural dwellers—to some extent building from the bottom up. Tedesco’s book, though it engages with some of the archaeological literature, is first and foremost a work of ancient history. In focusing primarily on the ancient sources and epigraphic evidence, it tends to approach the peasants through their relationships with the wealthier landowners and power brokers of rural society. Rural society in North Africa is arguably better served by a rich array of primary sources than it is by the depth and range of archaeological studies, which remain under-developed in comparison to many other areas of the Roman world.[3] In that respect, Tedesco’s book will be an essential point of reference, bringing together a wide range of source material in a new synthesis and analysis. A noteworthy feature of his approach is that he extends his analysis from the Late Roman empire, through the period of the Vandalic kingdom, to the Byzantine (re-)Conquest and the early Islamic era—an effective way of drawing out the profound continuities of rural life and also the diversity of ways in which rural labour was organised and exploited in each sub-period. Key influences for the project have clearly been Brent Shaw and Chris Wickham.[4] The book is dramatically titled, with ‘at the margins’ and ‘age of extremes’ perhaps inadvertently feeding a particular idea of adversity, when within the overall compass of ancient North Africa it is apparent that not all peasants were geographically liminal and that there were long periods of relative stability and prosperity.
The book opens with a methodological introduction on ‘Writing a Peasant History’. This reveals an important tension of the work between the desire to generalise about peasants and a particularly deep dive into a particular peasant community on one remote estate (the fundus Tuletianos). As this section shows, Tedesco is well aware of the difficulties of neatly categorising peasants, recognising the need to explore considerable regional variation as well as differentiation of peasant occupations, outlooks and ambitions. As noted already, the primary sources relating to peasants tend to be very top down—as he memorably puts it, ‘The job of peasants is to stay out of the archives’ (p. 29). Elsewhere in the book, though, we see the corollary of this, with elite landowners often playing a crucial role between peasants and the state, especially in terms of handling local tax collection (p. 133). Despite the focus of the book’s title on peasants, there is in fact much valuable discussion throughout on how peasants were managed and exploited by landowners.
In ‘Chapter One: A Land Teeming with Peasants’ Tedesco provides a rural history of Africa under Rome and an introduction to the rural elites, followed by a somewhat briefer overview of different groups of peasants, including rural tenants and labour and slaves. Given the importance of informal documentation relating to peasants (ostraca, writing tablets), it is perhaps surprising that no reference is made here to the Sfez archive.[5] The circumstances of discovery of this cache of documents (dating to the end of the 3rd century CE) is dubious to say the least (raising ethical issues about primary publication), but as a number have now been published and the material speaks so clearly of peasant households, completely ignoring its existence is also curious.
Chapter Two provides a summary of the extent of change, but also continuities, into the Vandal period (‘Ending of Empire and Peasant Trajectories’). Having begun this chapter with some broad generalisations for North African peasant society, the focus narrows to a series of micro-regional case studies on Tripolitania, the Mauretanias, Byzacena and Numidia—all more marginal territories that showed greater change in the Vandal period. Rather oddly, there is less discussion here of the evidence relating to the richest part of North Africa (Zeugitana or northern Africa Proconsularis).
Chapter Three then introduces the major case study that forms the heart of the book: ‘Peasants at the Margins: The Fundus Tuletianos’. The evidence here comes from the remarkable archive of 34 estate documents (a dowry agreement and many relating to land/property sales) dated to the end of the 5th century CE. The detailed account and analysis presented here will be a key point of departure henceforth regarding this collection, commonly known as the Albertini Tablets. All the same, it is a pity not to have had the text of a few of the key documents presented in full, with translations. The Tuletianos dossier was found close to the Tunisian/Algerian border west of modern Gafsa, in a semi-desert area where ancient agriculture was only feasible through the use of floodwater farming techniques that harvested and directed rainwater off a catchment basin into small garden plots in the valley bottoms.[6] This has an important bearing on the sort of estate society that existed here, the sort of farming that was practised and the nature of leases and sales present in the archive. Tedesco is very astute on some of this, but evidently less comfortable with the archaeological dimension.
What is undeniably impressive is his breakdown of the documentary evidence for this community, listing out every individual named in the tablets and tracing their links to the land sales and other individuals in the archive. As he notes, the information about the local topography and the boundaries of units of land is very detailed and ultimately a continuation of written practices from the Roman period that also facilitated the state’s ‘synoptical reach’ into rural communities that it needed to tax.
There has been much debate about why there was seemingly a flurry of sales of plots of land on the fundus in the period 493-496 CE. Prior to 493 the land was spread between 45 mainly peasant farmers, but by 496, there were fewer than 10 individuals holding land, with the landowner and his relations consolidating their absolute possession of land within the estate. Tedesco argues convincingly that this more likely related to the vicissitudes of individual peasant households rather than some general economic crisis (p. 143-48).
My views of the nature of the ‘land sales’ in the documents (which invoke a form of sharecropping known as Mancian tenure) differ from the position taken by Tedesco (p. 136-41), in that I believe that what was being sold was not the land per se, but a valuation of the investments that sharecropping tenants had made on the land (things like planting olive or other fruit trees, building and maintaining floodwater farming walls and sluices).[7] It seems clear that the prices in the Tablets do not equate to the freehold value of plots, with most of the figures for individual plots of land totalling only between 100-400 folles (see p. 113-15). Rather than relating to the area of land, the sale proceeds seem more calibrated to numbers of trees on the plot (and presumably the state of productivity of those trees). The variable value of field units would thus reflect the productive potential of the land—well maintained olives would have a higher value than poorly managed ones, a field with properly constructed irrigation walls and sluices would be worth more than one where such features were in need of repair. Indeed, a reason for taking over land adjoining an existing plot could have been a protection against erosion and other adverse effects related to an upstream field with poorly maintained sluices and walls.
‘Chapter Four: The World the Peasants Made’ is another really important contribution by Tedesco, in that he maps out the complex web of relationships that the documents relating to the fundus Tuletianos reveal (p. 153-54) and then analyses in fuller detail the patterns of transactions in which individuals were involved as buyers, neighbours or witnesses. The prosopographical connections he is able to trace are fascinating, especially when linked to other factors like literacy, marriage connections with the major landholding family (the Geminii) and so on. The assignment of individuals to different types of peasant family is to a degree speculative, but also plausible and insightful.
The following chapters (‘The Peasantry of the Byzantine Period’ and ‘Declining Prosperity and Peasant Life’) return to the chronological overview, taking the story into the early medieval period. Although these periods were potentially challenging ones for the African peasantry, as new state actors tried to impose or reimpose taxation and extractive systems on conquered territory, the reality on the ground for many peasant farmers may have been less dramatic. As Tedesco observes, there was a paradox of ‘declining prosperity alongside evidence of continued vitality’ (p. 230). The early Islamic period maintained the characteristic patterns of an assortment of peasant categories in contemporaneous existence as in earlier times, from minor tenant farmers and sharecroppers to rural wage earners and slaves.
The main conclusions of the book highlight this heterogeneity of landholding and labour organisation in North Africa across all the periods under review. Despite the periodic turbulence of the ‘age of extremes’, the African peasantry and the regional economy (and its interactions with Mediterranean markets) proved remarkably resilient. Such economic vitality has for long been observable in the archaeological evidence of African exports throughout the period from 3rd-9th centuries CE, but this detailed review of the literary, epigraphic and legal sources provides a much firmer historical perspective.
Overall, then, Tedesco’s book is an essential discussion of the diverse sources pertaining to North African peasants, enhanced also by his knowledge of the comparative historical literature on peasants in other periods and places. The picture is detailed, though built up in part from extrapolation based on the chance survival of some very specific documents, whose exact contexts and suitability for generalisation remain to an extent uncertain. Future discoveries or fuller publication of additional textual sources will no doubt enrich the picture further, but archaeology also has the potential to provide greater depth of detail relating to the lives and strategies that peasant families followed to evade or minimise the impact of state and landlord. While Tedesco’s book is now the essential foundation of debate, it is to be hoped that future archaeological research in North Africa along the lines of the work done by Kim Bowes in Italy can broaden the scope of enquiry.
Notes
[1] K. Bowes (ed), The Roman Peasant Project 2009-2014. Excavating the Roman Rural Poor, vols 1-2, University of Pennsylvania Museum, 2020—though this is notably absent from Tedesco’s bibliography; K. Bowes, Surviving Rome. The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. Princeton University Press: Princeton (2025) appeared too late for him to use, but again heralds the wider interest in the themes.
[2] L. Dossey, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa, University of California Press, 2010.
[3] D.J. Mattingly, Between Sahara and Sea. Africa in the Roman Empire, Michigan University Press: Ann Arbor, pp. 433-74; D.J. Mattingly, The Lost Domain: The rural archaeology of Africa in the Roman Empire, JRA 36 (2024), 579–89.
[4] B. Shaw, Bringing in the Sheaves: Economy and Metaphor in the Roman World, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2013; C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and Mediterranean 400—800,
Oxford University Press, 2005.
[5] P. Rothenhöfer and J. Blänsdorf, Sana mente sanaque memoria testamentum feci: Eine testamentarische Verfügung vom 12. April 340 n. Chr. Gephyra 13 (2016): 153– 63; cf. Année Epigraphique 2016, 2029– 2036.
[6] See D.J. Mattingly, Imperialism, Power and Identity Experiencing the Roman Empire, Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 165 for a map showing the approximate location of the estate. The farming systems were essentially similar to those described by the Libyan Valleys Survey, see G. Barker, D. Gilbertson, B. Jones and D.J. Mattingly (eds), Farming the Desert. The UNESCO Libyan Valleys Archaeological Survey. Volume 1 Synthesis and Volume 2, Gazetteer and Pottery, UNESCO, Soc. for Libyan Studies, 1996.
[7] D.J. Mattingly, Ancient olive cultivation and the Albertini Tablets. L’Africa romana 6 (1989): 403-15; for discussion of the way inheritance rights built into sharecropping agreements incentivised tenants to invest in improvements, see also D. Kehoe, The Economics of Agriculture on Roman Imperial Estates in North Africa, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, p. 39, 180-81.