Regional Pathways to Complexity: Settlement and Land-Use Dynamics in Early Italy from the Bronze Age to the Republican Period

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).Amsterdam Archaeological Studies is a series devoted to the study of past human societies from the prehistory up into modern times, primarily based on the study of archaeological remains. The series will include excavation reports of modern fieldwork; studies of categories of material culture; and synthesising studies with broader images of past societies, thereby contributing to the theoretical and methodological debates in archaeology.