Flows of people in villages and large centres in Bronze Age Italy through strontium and oxygen isotopes (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mobile elites at Frattesina: flows of people in a Late Bronze Age 'port of trade' in northern Italy
Antiquity, 2019
Following a mid twelfth-century BC demographic crisis, Frattesina, in northern Italy, arose as a prominent hub linking continental Europe and the Mediterranean, as evidenced by the remarkable variety of exotic materials and commodities discovered at the site. Debate persists, however, about the extent to which migrants influenced the foundation and development of Frattesina. The authors present the results of strontium isotope analyses, which suggest significant migration to the site, particularly of elites, mostly from within a 50km radius. Among these non-indigenous people, the authors identify a ‘warrior-chief’, whom they interpret as representing a new, more hierarchical society.
The Iron Age in South Italy: Settlement, Mobility and Culture Contact
In a study concerned with understanding the types of population and modes of contanct in the multiple ecosystems of Iron Age southern Italy, ranging from the Greek poleis of the coastal flood plains to the Appenine mountain regions of Calabria and Lucania, it is necessary to examine the contexts carefully, as each culture or cultural or social group and every region may react differently to contacts with other cultures. Particularly instructive in this respect is the picture that emerges from the Ionnian coast between Taras and Sybaris and its immediate hinterland, where it is possible to compare and differentiate realities that are not necessarily homogeneous or fully standardised. This paper discusses three different contexts along the Ionian coast, namely L'Amastuola, Incoronata and Francavilla Marittima, where the traditional reconstruction of the settlement dynamics, as proposed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, saw the presence of the Greek as a disruptive element which shattered a static indigenous situation and that led first to the conquest and subjugation of the indigenous inhabitants who lived around the immediate hinterland of the colonial settlements, and then resulted in full-blown inter-ethnic conflict. This perspective interpreted the clear traces of transformations between the eight and the seventh centuries in the indigenous settlements around the area later occupied by the Greek chorai as evidence of local communities succumbing to the impact of the Greeek arriva. In this paper, I will first discuss this traditional reconstruction, with particular attention to the inland regions of the Appennine mountains, before considering mobility and cultural contact in the Italic world and exploring the settlements and developments of indigenous communities between Iron Age I and II.
Origini XLII, 2018
This paper discusses socio-cultural developments in central and southern Italy between the late 3rd and the early 1st millennia BC, particularly focussing on settlement patterns. Over this span of time, the foundations were laid for the process towards urbanisation that occurred in various Italian regions at the threshold of the historic period. Two major settlement patterns are recognised, each having specific variations on a regional scale and depending on environmental conditions: 1) small hamlets, often forming definite clusters, which had a long tradition and tended to be resilient to socio-cultural changes; 2) larger settlements, devoted to exchange activities and craft production, which were mostly naturally/artificially fortified, long-lasting and more prone to internal changes. These latter in particular developed from the 18th century BC onwards. Some ceased at the end of the 1st millennium BC, but others instead grew, existing alongside new-established flourishing centres that based their success on both their agricultural and military potentials, so enabling their fast demographic growth.
Journal of Archaeological Research , 2020
Open access; free download from 10.1007/s10814-019-09141-w The Late Neolithic and Copper Age were a time of change in most of Europe. Technological innovations including animal traction, the wheel, and plow agriculture transformed the prehistoric economy. The discovery of copper metallurgy expanded the spectrum of socially significant materials and realigned exchange networks away from Neolithic “greenstone,” obsidian, and Spondylus shells. New funerary practices also emerged, signifying the growing importance of lineage ancestors, as well as new ideas of personal identity. These phenomena have long attracted researchers’ attention in continental Europe and the British Isles, but comparatively little has been done in the Italian peninsula. Building on recent discoveries and interdisciplinary research on settlement patterns, the subsistence economy, the exchange of socially valuable materials, the emergence of metallurgy, funerary practices, and notions of the body, I critically appraise current models of the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition in light of the Italian regional evidence, focusing on central Italy. In contrast to prior interpretations of this period as the cradle of Bronze Age social inequality and the prestige goods economy, I argue that, at this juncture, prehistoric society reconfigured burial practices into powerful new media for cultural communication and employed new materials and objects as novel identity markers. Stratified political elites may not be among the new identities that emerged at this time in the social landscape of prehistoric Italy.
2010
be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the editors of this book. 6. nkn y k-nn nn n n y 6.1 Introduction 6.2 The hegemony of Sybaris 6.3 Iron Age indigenous settlement expansion and early indigenous-Greek encounters 6.4 A colonial enclave and its wider context: Taras and the Salento peninsula 6.5 Questioning early Greek colonial impact Box 6.1 Greeks and natives at L'Amastuola 7. nn bnzn n p 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Archaic urbanization in the Salento peninsula 7.3 Urbanization and early Roman colonization in the Pontine region 7.4 Conclusion 8. nf, bnzn n n xpnn 8.1 Roman conquest and colonization 8.2 Rural settlement 8.3 Urban development 8.4 Rural infill and the expansion of agriculture 8.5 Local variability in rural trends 8.6 Comparing rural settlement patterns in Central and South Italy 8.7 Exploring a macro-regional explanation 8.8 Epilogue: late Republican agriculture and the city of Rome 9. p-n pv ppv 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Methodological advances 9.3 Interpretations 9.4 Final remarks Bibliographic references Index Colour plates pf This volume synthesizes the results of a Dutch landscape-archaeological project in central and southern Italy, called Regional Pathways to Complexity (RPC). Although the project itself started in 1997 and formally ended in 2001, it is correctly viewed as only the latest in a long series of archaeological research projects by the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) and the Archaeological Centre of the Free University of Amsterdam (ACVU) in Italy. Accordingly, this volume synthesizes studies undertaken since the early 1980s as well as others conducted in the years since the RPC project ended. 1 A study of central and southern Italy between the end of the Bronze Age and the end of the Roman Republican period presents several major challenges: the size of the region, the length of the period under investigation, and especially the difficulty to investigate effectively the long-term processes operating at this time in this area, processes that involved the growing complexity of indigenous societies, and the transformation of traditional rural and pastoral ways of life into urbanism during the period of 'external' Greek and Roman colonization. Our purpose was not only to synthesize the results of the fieldwork, but also to present interpretations of and reflections on these processes, the approaches we used to investigate them, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical models applied by ourselves and others to explain our findings. This is why the introductory and concluding chapters contain extensive discussions of methodology. It is hoped that the RPC experience, once published, will be of interest to others pursuing similar studies. f bk Chapter 1 introduces the RPC project itself and provides an outline of its methodology. The chapter discusses, firstly, the integration of settlement archaeology, environmental research, ethnography and ceramics studies; and, secondly, the problems presented by, on the one hand, systematic biases in the archaeological record and, on the other, by our attempt to compare differently constituted regional archaeological records. The remainder of the volume is organised into two parts, the first (chapters 2 to 4) being arranged chronologically by region, the second (chapters 5 to 8) chronologically by theme. A final chapter pulls together the main threads and conclusions of our argument. The first few chapters deal with each of the three RPC regions in turn (chapter 2: Pontine region, chapter 3: Salento isthmus, chapter 4: Sibaritide). Each chapter begins with a reconstruction of the principal geographical and environmental factors that influenced the forms of human habitation and land use. This is followed by a chronologically ordered discussion of actual settlement configurations and land use patterns, based on comparisons of the various field surveys and other settlement data. Each chapter sets out to describe the intra-regional differentiation in settlement and land use in relation to geography and environment. Together, these chapters provide a general context for the thematic and chronological comparison of the three RPC study regions in part II. The later chapters deal with the major changes that occurred in our three regions between the Bronze Age and the Roman Imperial period. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the protohistorical phases, with a particular focus on the formation of proto-urban centres and 'rural infill' of the landscape prior to Greek 1 All Dutch research up to 2005 in the three study areas has been included in the current study, as well as important publications up to 2008. or Roman colonization. Chapter 6 looks more closely at the earliest colonizations, investigating the impact of Greek colonization on indigenous settlement and society and questioning the presumed political and cultural dominance of the Greek colonial city-states. Chapter 7 focuses on Archaic urbanisation processes in Salento and the Pontine region. Chapter 8 explores the phenomenon of rural expansion that accompanied the process of urbanization in Italy in the Hellenistic (or Roman Republican) period, and in particular in the late 4 th-3 rd centuries BC; it closes with an epilogue dedicated to further transformations during the late Republican period. knwn The RPC project was one of three large archaeological projects that received funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research in 1997, in the context of the programme 'Settlement and Landscape in Archaeology' (NWO grant no. 250-09-100). We are extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to pursue this line of research, as well as for NWO's patience when this final synthetic volume was delayed. Likewise, the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) has steadfastly supported RPC project staff and students of the participating institutions over the years by hosting meetings and study visits. We are especially grateful for the Institute's sponsorship of this publication, which together with smaller subsidies by GIA and ACVU made possible both proper editing of the English text, and the use of colour for the maps and photographs. Several colleagues from both participating institutions have been closely involved in the research for many years, and we wish to acknowledge our debt to their work, enthusiasm and expertise: Dr. Bert Nijboer for sharing with us his extensive knowledge of protohistoric Italy, Prof. Douwe Yntema for his expertise on Apulian archaeology and supervision of the dissertations of Veenman and Mater, Prof. em. Marianne Kleibrink for first directing the excavation programs at Satricum and Francavilla and then sharing her profound knowledge of the archaeology of Latium and the Sibaritide, Dr. Jan Sevink for his supervision of Van Joolen's dissertation, and Dr. Jan Delvigne for his supervision of students and especially for the enjoyable and insightful field trips at which we learned a lot about the past and present landscapes of the Pontine Region and the Sibaritide. Other colleagues contributed toward the success of the RPC project through their participation in a 3-day conference organised by the
The metal finds are a particularly important material for studying the contacts that flourished particularly in the period during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and the beginning of the Early Iron Age (EIA). These artefactswere recovered mostly from hoards. Hoards testify not only to the economic prosperity of the people living in the italian sphere, but also to the Central Mediterranean being the real heart of the sea trade-routes between East and West. According to the interregional connections and traffic taking place during the latest phases of prehistory, Italy can be divided into two main regions. One was localised along the Tyrrhenian Sea; it was mainly connected in an earlier phase to the Eastern Mediterranean, then with the atlantic area: it includes Sicily Sardinia and, partially, Etruria. The other region was located in southern Italy, more precisely in Apulia and Calabria; it was mostly involved in trade with the Aegean and the Balkans – i. e. with the opposite shores of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas –, but not with Western Europe.
Scientific Reports
The Early Iron Age in Italy (end of the tenth to the eighth century BCE) was characterized by profound changes which influenced the subsequent political and cultural scenario in the peninsula. At the end of this period people from the eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Phoenicians and Greek people) settled along the Italian, Sardinian and Sicilian coasts. Among local populations, the so-called Villanovan culture group—mainly located on the Tyrrhenian side of central Italy and in the southern Po plain—stood out since the beginning for the extent of their geographical expansion across the peninsula and their leading position in the interaction with diverse groups. The community of Fermo (ninth–fifth century BCE), related to the Villanovan groups but located in the Picene area (Marche), is a model example of these population dynamics. This study integrates archaeological, osteological, carbon (δ13C), nitrogen (δ15N) (n = 25 human) and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotope data (n = 54 human, n = 11 baseline samples) to explore human mobility through Fermo funerary contexts. The combination of these different sources enabled us to confirm the presence of non-local individuals and gain insight into community connectivity dynamics in Early Iron Age Italian frontier sites. This research contributes to one of the leading historical questions of Italian development in the first millennium BCE.
The book under review is in line with the growing popularity of Social Network Analysis in archaeology. The Mediterranean region in particular is witnessing a surge in studies on ancient networks and their significance for cultural development in different regions and periods. The importance of maritime connectivity has eloquently been made clear by N. Horden and P. Purcell,1 C. Broodbank2 and several others. Social Network Analysis is emerging as a powerful tool to quantitatively map and evaluate connectivity and its effects on material culture.3 Time will tell whether this popularity of Social Network Analysis constitutes a veritable paradigm shift in the study of the ancient Mediterranean. But it does lead to new perspectives on established fields in archaeology, of which this book is an example.
This stimulating book fills a major gap in the literature on Iron Age urbanism. In Europe, the rise of urban centres has been viewed primarily through the prism of the Classical world, with research focused on the archetypical city state societies of Greece, Etruria and Latium, and on Greek colonies overseas. According to the conventional model, urban settlements-in the guise of fortified oppida and other large agglomerations-did not appear in temperate Europe until the final centuries BC and even then were a pale reflection of their southern neighbours. The shortlived Hallstatt D Fürstensitze (princely sites) that emerged in the 6th century BC north of the Alps, such as the Heuneburg in southwest Germany and Vix-Mont Lassois in eastern France, were long deemed too small to be urban, their rise and fall in any case driven by their close links with Mediterranean societies. Northern Italy, meanwhile, has rarely figured in discussions of early European urbanism, with urban status denied to the large late Bronze Age aggregations in the Po plain, whilst Iron Age centres such as Felsina (Bologna), Marzabotto and Spina were typically assimilated to greater Etruria, as offshoots, colonies or trading stations. The present book originated in a meeting held in 2019 in Milan to compare earlier Iron Age urbanisation processes on both sides of the Alps and explore the role of interregional interaction in the emergence of more complex social forms. Given everything that has intervened sinceand we cannot forget that northern Italy was hit both very early and very hard by the pandemic