Roman horticulture beyond the frontier: garden cultivation at Iron Age Uppåkra (Sweden)

Traditionally, the study of Roman cultural imports to Roman Iron Age societies in Scandinavia has been based on analysis of the artefactual record. The starting point has been artefacts held to be high-status objects deriving chiefly from funerary contexts and, to a lesser degree, from settlement sites. Although the existing evidence at Uppåkra, a high-status settlement site in Scania province, Sweden, comes only from residential contexts, we will address the ongoing debate concerning Roman cultural imports with ecofactual evidence, to consider which aspects of Roman culture were introduced, which parts of Roman society were mediators, and the underlying social reasons for the introduction of the archaeobotanical remains into indigenous Iron Age society.