Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Endre Fodstad]

I can't follow you here. Lucas specifically includes fulling mills into his count of medieval industrial mills, otherwise it would have been hardly enough material for a survey, because (quote from p.15) by far the most abundant types of industrial mill in the sample for medieval Europe are fulling mills and forge mills, which account for 80 percent of the sample (table 3), with tanning mills, sawmills, and toolsharpening mills contributing another 12 percent of the total.

Perhaps I put that a bit wrong. I was referring to the idea that there is a problem at all with putting fulling mills into the survey, which he implies when presenting the survey data with reservations for fulling mills.

He certainly has, although I suspect that, while the overall number of medieval European water-mills will certainly rise significantly then, the [i]proportion of industrial mills to agricultural mills may remain similar or could even decline, given the fact that the most advanced regions with presumbly the most industrial mills have already been fairly well researched.

Since the spanish and german territories were considerably more advanced than the british isles (note, for example, the extreme lateness of the english adoption of the blast furnace), there is all good reason to suspect the opposite. We'll have to wait and see.

If you have any sources in Spanish or German on watermills, please let me know, I would like to look into the matter further.

There is an extensive bibliography in "Working with water in medieval Europe" (Technology and Change in history series). No scandinavian and little spanish material, but a good start.

Did he do that in the book? In his article, he refrained from any attempts at quantifying ancient water mills and restricted himself on pointing out the inventiveness of the ancient world in water power technology.

There is definitely some sort of comparison going on in the article, although not directly empirically - he doesn't limit himself to remarking on the existence of them, but continually uses phrases (for roman era industrial milling) such as "widespread use", "widely used" and so on, even though the evidence on the ground is rather thin (if it is not entirely circumstantial). In the book, he doesn't make any direct comparisons either (that would be academic suicide) but still starts with an a priori assessment of a wide use of industrial water power in the ancient world that we still lack evidence for. This is a bit odd in itself - he needs something to compare with, or it would be a bit difficult to make any assessments on the widespreadness of industrial waterpower in the middle ages overall, but why he chooses antiquety rather than the far better documented early modern period is beyond me.