> discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families

I find the idea that every pre-modern peasant in every society had the same basic contours of life extremely silly.

Maybe he means British or French peasants? That's what people usually mean by "peasants".

Even within Europe the very basic ideas on when and how you marry and how you treat land ownership were wildly different.

> What we can do, however is uncover the lives of these peasant households through modeling.

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean.

> I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive

The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.

> Maybe he means British or French peasants?

He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.

He mentions in the post that his focus is on Roman history, and that his discussion on peasants will be most applicable to the late Mediterranean antiquity

Sometimes you just need to read the sources that were linked to you:

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...