<html>Hirth and the <i>Tabernarius</i>: Shopkeepers and the Urban Economy</html>
Author(s): Glenn Storey
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "Crafting a Legacy in Archaeology: Papers Celebrating the Career of Ken Hirth" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
In his magisterial tome, The Organization of Ancient Economies: A Global Perspective, Kenneth Hirth made many observations based on his study of Greco-Roman patterns of commerce. He knew that the archaeology of Roman cities has provided literally hundreds of examples of shops and shopfronts, many embedded in the big fancy houses along the streets of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia and even a few from Rome itself. In contrast to the Aztec Empire, the highly monetarized economy of the Roman Empire developed basic banking institutions offering credit, known examples generally involving substantial sums of money. In thinking about Roman shops, Hirth suggested that a shopkeeper (the tabernarius) must have provided “informal credit” to his daily, well-known customers from the immediate neighborhood. In assessing this question, I suggested that if that were so, somewhere in the Roman legal codes this form of credit should be a topic of discussion, but specific citations have not been featured in the literature. So, a search of the appropriate legal databases on this question needed to be carried out—yet another example of “things we don’t know about the Romans.” Here I present the surprising results of this search and conclude that Ken was “right yet again.”
Cite this Record
Hirth and the Tabernarius: Shopkeepers and the Urban Economy. Glenn Storey. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509556)
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Abstract Id(s): 50798