The Changing Landscapes of Rome's Northern Hinterland presents a new
regional history of the middle Tiber valley as a lens through which to
view the emergence and transformation of the city of Rome from 1000 BC
to AD 1000. Setting the ancient city within the context of its immediate
territory, the authors reveal the diverse and enduring links between the
metropolis and its hinterland. At the heart of the volume is a detailed
consideration of the results of a complete restudy of the pioneering
South Etruria Survey (c. 1955-1970), one of the earliest and most
influential Mediterranean landscape projects. Between 1998 and 2002, an
international team based at the British School at Rome conducted a
comprehensive restudy of the material and documentary archive generated
by the South Etruria Survey. The results were supplemented with a number
of other published and unpublished sources of archaeological evidence to
create a database of around 5000 sites across southern Etruria and the
Sabina Tiberina, extending in date from the Bronze Age, through the
Etruscan/Sabine, Republican and imperial periods, to the middle ages.
Analysis and discussion of these data have appeared in a series of
interim articles published over the past two decades; the present volume
offers a final synthesis of the project results. The chapters include
the first detailed assessment of the field methods of the South Etruria
Survey, an extended discussion of the use of archaeological legacy data,
and new insights into the social and economic connectivities between
Rome and the communities of its northern hinterland across two
millennia. The volume as a whole demonstrates how the archaeological
evidence generated by landscape surveys can be used to rewrite narrative
histories, even those based on cities as familiar as ancient Rome.
Includes contributions by Martin Millett, Simon Keay and Christopher
Smith, and a preface by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill.
