Invisible Labour in Antiquity

Visualizing Obscure Work in the Ancient Mediterannean and West Asia

Andrade, Nathanael (ed.)
Raja, Rubina (ed.)

Labour in Antiquity, ranging from commerce and trade to physical labour, slavery, and the activity of subalterns, has long been studied, and the notion that certain elements of labour are not immediately visible in source material is widely accepted. Even so, the concept of "invisible labour", that is, labour hidden from the view of either ancient peoples or modern scholars, has, up to now, been very little studied. This volume aims to address the balance by examining how the quotidian behaviours and strategies of "invisible" ancient people shaped economic life, and vice versa, and by exploring new ways to account for the invisible, both empirically and methodologically, through an analysis of environmental, social, and cultural factors. The scholars writing in this volume focus on different key trends. Some address the impact of practices determined by environmental or social factors, such as caravan trading, religious practice, transhumanism, and maritime commerce, on economies at a micro- and macro-level. Others examine the effect that daily routines of the invisible, including peasants, nomads, daily labourers, and vendors, had on local economies and the formation of broader socio-economic structures. Bridging classics, archaeology, history, and the natural sciences, the chapters gathered here offer important new insights into work that is often hardly visible in the evidence but that drove the economies of the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western Asia in antiquity.