Speaker

Kim Bowes

Kim Bowes

Roman archaeologist and historian at the University of Pennsylvania, former director of the American Academy in Rome, and author of Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent (2026).

Bowes built her scholarly reputation across two research programmes. Her earlier work on late Roman Christianity — examining what private religious spaces looked like, how Christian practice differed from episcopal prescription, and how material religion evolved — established her as a leading figure in the archaeology of early Christian life. Her more recent programme uses landscape archaeology (the non-invasive study of whole rural landscapes through surface survey, geophysics, and drone photography) to reconstruct the economic lives of ordinary Romans: the farmers, craftspeople, and smallholders who made up the vast majority of the empire’s population but left almost no written record.

Surviving Rome argues that the Roman world was a sophisticated consumer economy whose ninety percent were active participants — buying clothes from distant workshops, using money daily, and trusting state-issued coinage even through debasement. The book challenges the assumption that ordinary Romans were subsistence farmers, and proposes consumption rather than ideology or military force as the underappreciated glue that held the empire together.

Core positions

Material evidence over literary sources. Bowes holds that the Roman world is consistently distorted when read through its elite literary output, and that archaeological evidence — ceramics, shoes, papyri, the physical fabric of buildings — gives a less filtered, more demographically representative picture. She is an advocate for digitised papyri (papyri.info) as an under-exploited source for economic history, and argues that new rescue archaeology ahead of construction across southern Europe will transform the field within a generation.

Economic reasoning without economic theory. She defends Roman economic sophistication while conceding Romans never formalised it: they reasoned about prices, futures, and profit without producing anything resembling a treatise on political economy. She reads this as a different mode of thought, not an absence of thought.

Demography and monetary trust as the keys to decline. Her emerging thesis for Rome’s transformation in late antiquity centres on a broken feedback loop: high population sustained local exchange, which sustained tax revenues, which sustained the state. Population decline — possibly beginning under Hadrian — broke that loop. Persistent monetary trust, even through severe debasement, is a separate puzzle she is still working through.

In the wiki