South Italian Archaeology Research Papers (original) (raw)

This paper summarizes the thesis, exposed by the writer over the past two decades, about the Romanization of Bruttii. The Romanization of Bruttii is carried out and completed between the third and first centuries BC The analysis of this process is very complex and must necessarily be inserted in the framework of the annexation of Rome to the southern part of the Italy and in the gradual Romanization of the people who had settled there. The authentic and definitive Romanization of Bruttii seems to be accomplished, then, only after the end of the war with Hannibal.
In Bruttii, as we have tried to show in the last two decades, there are all reasonable evidence to suggest that, during the second half of the second century BC and the first half of the second century AD, in some areas of the region has taken hold the “slave mode of production”. To be affected by this mode of production are the areas of Copia, Vibo Valentia, the middle valley of the Crati, coastal areas and some other enclaves in the rest of the region. The villas and the slave mode of production are in crisis, as in the central Tyrrhenian, during the second century AD, but -a difference of what happens in Etruria, Latium and Campania-in the extreme region of the Italy, especially the its southern part, from the fourth century AD seems to have a last period of prosperity. In Bruttii seems to exist in the fourth century AD a type of property that seems to still have the building of the villa as a driving force of an enormous expanse of land that, in the form of "social territory," combines the different and seculars economic and social histories of the production areas of the plains, the hills and mountains. This type of estate obtains these economic and social conditions just because the property is so large as to contain inside the capacity and capital to carry out simple and inexpensive crop rotations and a convenient vertical transhumance. Between the late sixth and early seventh A.D. will cease to exist - even in Bruttii who in recent decades will change the name in Calabria - the urban civilization and the ancient economy and begins a new phase for the social and economic relationships among people. Almost all the ancient cities are surely buried, the agricultural landscape for centuries deeply humanized again returns to be wild and is reclaimed from nature that recovers what had been removed from the work of men. Between the late sixth and early seventh century AD ends, forever, a world and another begins to form: the Middle Ages. The great complexity that, in recent decades, has been attributed by many scholars to late antiquity, we believe it is due, on the one hand, to the reduced availability of tools available to archaeologists and historians to reconstruct and read the sources and, on the other hand, the coexistence -within the same region, of the same territory- of a variety of modes of production and organization of social, political and cultural. In our opinion, it is assigned a complexity to an era in which, however, the agricultural landscapes, the cities, the political, religious, social and economic think they have become simpler, less complex and, of course, less humanized.