Abstract
The Languedoc-Roussillon region of southern France is well known today for producing full-bodied red wines. Yet wine grapes are not native to France. Additionally, wine was not developed indigenously first. In the 7th century B.C. Etruscan merchants bringing wine landed on the shores of the Languedoc and established trade relationships with the native Gauls, later creating local viticulture, and laying the foundation for a strong cultural identity of French wine production and setting in motion a multi-billion dollar industry. This paper examines the first five centuries of wine consumption (from ~600 B.C. to ~100 B.C.), analyzing how preference of one type of luxury good over another created distinctive artifact patterns in the archaeological record. I create a simple agent-based model to examine how the trade of comestibles for wine led to a growing economy and a distinctive patterning of artifacts in the archaeological record of southern France. This model helps shed light on the processes that led to centuries of peaceable relationships with colonial merchants, and interacts with scholarly debate on why Etruscan amphorae are replaced by Greek amphorae so swiftly and completely.
Highlights
Understanding the choices that people made in the past is difficult, if not impossible, without written sources directly telling us why people chose specific courses of action
Through using an agent-based model on a heterogeneous population it is suggested that the economy of this area was driven by the choices of Gauls as consumers, and not by the availability of goods; this work articulates with longstanding debates in the prehistory of France
This research asks the question: what caused the complete switch in wine amphorae from Etruscan to Greek styles in the Languedoc when clearly both groups were present on the landscape? This model aims to examine the abrupt transition from Etruscan amphorae to Greek amphorae as discovered by Py [2] and reported in Figure 1 by modeling strictly local processes
Summary
Understanding the choices that people made in the past is difficult, if not impossible, without written sources directly telling us why people chose specific courses of action. It is these choices that led to the archaeological record; today we can see the aggregate of these decisions. Most wine consumed in southern France was not even grown by Gauls, instead being imported to Gaulish settlements [4,5]. Complex economic partnerships linking Gauls to Etruscan and later to Greek merchants were essential, yet these trade relationships had far-reaching effects for the household economies of both indigenous and colonist populations
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