Urban landscape survey in Italy and the Mediterranean

Field survey has been making a major contribution to our understanding of the rural landscapes of the Mediterranean for nearly forty years. During that time the techniques used to map ancient settlement patterns have grown in sophistication from being a process of simply identifying sites in the landscape, to one which provided nuanced understandings of their layouts, chronologies and contexts. This has led to a revolution in how archaeologists approach urban sites, with survey techniques being used increasingly often to generate a plan of a town site prior to excavation as a way of ensuring that the excavation can be used to address site-specific questions in a way that had not been possible before. Most recently, research has begun to reveal the advantages of integrating a range of different non-destructive techniques on urban sites. In combination with exciting new computer-based means of data visualization, all of this work means that it is now possible to virtually reconstruct a buried town within a relatively short space of time, as opposed to the old and destructive excavation-centered approach that could take generations. Unsurprisingly these advances are starting to make a very important understanding to urbanism in general and the Roman Empire in particular. Urban Landscape Survey in Italy and the Mediterranean builds upon all these new developments and is one of the first publications to focus exclusively upon the contribution of survey techniques to our understanding of ancient towns. It addresses methodology led enquiry into the nature of urban settlements primarily in Italy, but also in Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Portugal and Spain. The twenty-two papers from leading specialists in the field focus on two underlying themes. The first deals with the characterization of urban sites and draws upon a wide range of case studies. These range from key protohistoric centres in central and south Italy, to towns that epitomise the contradictions of cultural change under Rome, such as Paestum, Aquinum and Sagalassos, to Roman centres such as Teano, Suasa and Ammaia. The second theme is inter-urban relationships, looking in particular at wider urbanized landscapes in Italy. The fascinating selection of recent and on-going projects presented here significantly moves the limits of our current knowledge about ancient towns

Regional Pathways to Complexity

Synthesizing almost 30 years of Dutch archaeological research in central and southern Italy, this book discusses and compares settlement and land use patterns from the late protohistoric period to the late Roman Republic. Exploring both social and environmental explanations, as well as interregional parallellisms and divergences, the authors take a multi-scalar approach (from micro-regional to supra-regional) to the long-term development of indigenous Bronze Age tribal pastoralist societies towards the complexity of urbanized Roman society. The culmination of a joint project conducted between 1997 and 2005, the comparative perspective offered by this book is based on the results of long-term landscape archaeological fieldwork projects by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (in Lazio and Calabria) and the Archaeological Centre of the Free University (in Puglia)

Participation as an effective way to stimulate multivocality in heritage discourse?

There is almost a consensus in Critical Heritage Studies that 'communities' should be given the opportunity to develop their own heritage discourses, instead of having to adopt the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD) (Smith 2006). Consequently, community-led, bottom-up participation is increasingly advocated as an alternative, much better attuned as it is to the increasing quest within society at large for democratic decision making and multivocality in heritage management. In practice, however, organizing bottom-up efforts to enable communities to develop their own heritage discourse is easier said than done. The communities involved are often not egalitarian and homogeneous. In this chapter, we use Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD framework) to analyze the case of Muro Tenente, an archaeological site in Southern Italy. The central questions are how the communities around Muro Tenente are structured, what their heritage discourses are and why, and whether participation has created room for more than just the AHD. As part of this study, we coordinated a series of interviews in 2018 and 2019 and observed three workshops in 2019