The Roman Peasant Project, co-directed by Kimberly Bowes and Campbell Grey (Penn, Classical Studies), seeks to uncover the lived experience of the peasantry in the Roman period: their diet, economic activities, and social networks. We exploit a combination of field survey, geophysical exploration and targeted, rescue-style excavation, and place these results alongside evidence gleaned from historical, zoo-archaeological, archaeo-botanical and geological sources. Our aim is to produce 'thick descriptions' of the lives of the poorest rural inhabitants of this world, who formed perhaps as much as 90% of the population of the Mediterranean in antiquity.