64

Two recent, large-scale archaeological surveys on the rural world of Britain and northern Gaul in the Roman period provide an opportunity to propose a new vision of the countryside and to reflect on the modalities of economic growth in the north-western provinces of the Empire. It now appears that this growth was based on an already very solid development during the Late Iron Age and that the conquest did not, in itself, provoke immediate change or a real economic boom. Agricultural development was a long-term movement that reached its peak in the second century before slowly regressing, perhaps because its limits had been reached. The emergence of the Roman villa, traditionally considered the driving force of progress, was slower than previously thought, and it is probably necessary to reconsider the classic opposition between “productive” large estates and small farms dedicated to self-sufficiency. The two surveys carried out on either side of the Channel have also emphasized the diversity of the agro-pastoral systems observed. This article therefore proposes to reexamine the indices of growth using various proxies (density of land use, volume of granaries, size of animals), the possible factors of economic development (demographic growth, increase in cultivated area, cultivation methods, improved productivity, new markets), and the pace of development, while highlighting the limits of this development and the regional differentiation that resulted from it.