The Roman Peasant Project, 2009-2014: excavating the Roman rural poor

Review by Luuk de Ligt The two volumes that make up this publication present the results of the ambitious Roman Peasant Project co-directed by Kim Bowes and Cam Grey. Geographically, the focus of the book is on the region of Cinigiano, Grosseto province, in southern Tuscany. Chapters 4 to 11 provide detailed discussions of eight non-elite sites that were excavated in this area, thus almost doubling the number of Roman-Italian non-elite sites excavated to date. All of these sites were identified between 2006 and 2008, during a field survey and remote-sensing project carried out by Mariaelena Ghisleni. In her doctoral dissertation, Ghisleni classified rural sites according to a widely used