The Tuscania Archaeological Survey investigated the archaeology of the countryside within a 10 km radius of the small town of Tuscania some 80 km northwest of Rome. The aim of the project was to contribute to present understanding of the processes that have shaped the development of the modern Mediterranean landscape as a physical and cultural construct. The specific research context of the project was debates about these processes in Etruria, the western side of central Italy that was the heartland of the Etruscan civilization in the mid first millennium BC: the character of prehistoric settlement prior to Etruscan urbanization; the relations between Etruscan towns and their rural populations; the impact on Tuscania and its landscape of being absorbed into the expanding Roman empire (‘Romanization’) and its economic structures after about 300 BC;the collapse of that system in the mid first millennium AD and the subsequent emergence of nucleated medieval villages (incastellamento); and the vicissitudes of peasant life through the political upheavals of medieval and post-medieval Italy. The chapter closes with an explanation of why we selected Tuscania and its intensively-farmed volcanic landscape as an ideal ‘laboratory’ for investigating this long-term landscape history, and how the project was planned.

We first summarise the principal findings of the Tuscania Archaeological Survey in terms of the diachronic settlement trends over the past 7500 years that are reconstructed in the previous chapters. The Tuscania story partly mirrors settlement models proposed by other authors for central Italy as a whole and partly diverges from them.In the second section we use a GIS analysis to compare the respective effectiveness of the three landscape sampling strategies we employed. This suggests that all three were equally effective in revealing settlement patterns in the Republican and Early Imperial phases characterized by dispersed and dense rural populations, whereas they revealed contrasting information about the less dense and more variably patterned Etruscan settlement pattern.We review the contribution of the project’s geomorphological studies to the Mediterranean alluviation debate, indicating complex interactions between climate and human actions in landscape formation. The project’s 7500–year ‘archaeological history’ chimes with Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s characterization of Mediterranean landscape history as “continuities of form or pattern, within which all is mutability” (The Corrupting Sea, p. 523).

This paper explores how the sociopolitical, economic, and demographic transformations of the Middle Republican period affected rural settlement and landscape exploitation in Central Tyrrhenian Italy. Two lines of archaeological inquiry are pursued. The first concerns settlement data from three major survey projects: the South Etruria Survey, Rome Suburbium Project, and Pontine Region Project. Despite local variation, these surveys highlight two general changes firmly placed in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC: an increase in rural site numbers and the rise of specialized commercial farms. The second topic concerns centuriation. It is argued that some field systems, including the centuriation of the Pontine plain, were laid out in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries to reclaim marginal landscapes. Labor-cost analyses suggest such projects involved substantial and sustained investment. The chapter then discusses the implications of these rural transformations in relation to urban contexts and the period’s broader history. Despite continuous warfare, Central Italy apparently witnessed demographic and economic growth, which in turn contributed to Rome’s expansion.

Chapter 3 focusses on the temple of Hera at Foce del Sele north of the Greek colony of Poseidonia-Paestum in southern Italy. New archaeometric analysis on the metopes from the Hera sanctuary near the mouth of the river Sele has made it possible to propose a new reconstruction of the oldest Hera temple on the site, which belongs to the first generation of Doric stone temples. The study of the architectural elements confirms the decorative nature of the first Doric friezes. Moreover, by analyzing the mythological subjects on the frieze and comparing them with other early Doric temples in Selinous, Delphi, and Athens, it can be shown that the tendency to choose Panhellenic themes over local traditions is a general feature of early Doric temples. Because of the detachment of the imagery from local traditions, the Doric temple is described as a “non-place” according to the definition of the French anthropologist Marc Augé. Conceiving temples as standardized “non-places” that could be set up in any given local environment was crucial to the agendas of Greek elites, who needed to reorganize agricultural and urban landscapes to regulate population pressure and social tensions – both in the colonies and in homeland Greece.

The relationship between landscape and place names is very strong. In ancient times, places were named after natural resources and the landscape’s hydro-geo-morphological features. This trend persists today in some contexts. For instance, Abui place names on Alor Island are named after important landscape features, agricultural and horticultural crops, and useful plants. Abui toponyms are compounded with lexemes describing human settlements and highlighting the close relationship between nature and man. This chapters shows how the analysis of the landscape and related disciplines, like landscape archaeology (the study of the past use of the landscape determined by archaeological findings), enable scholars to reconstruct the remote origins of toponyms both in Indo-European and non-Indo-European contexts. While landscape is often considered in association with the physical features of a territory, the authors call for a holistic view of the landscape itself, which blends physical, social, cultural, environmental, and religious dimensions. To this end, toponyms are useful tools providing the researchers with insights into how people use or used the landscape.

This chapter synthesizes the book's arguments in a concluding discussion that brings the world of Archaic Cyprus into more substantive conversation on approaches to human-environment relationships writ large, from the horizons of eighth- and seventh-century BCE transformation across the Mediterranean to our contemporary struggles to conceptualize future triangulations of social and environmental change. It first summarizes the explanations for the settlement and land use patterns discernible in the material records from the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, articulating local heterogeneities with signs of social inequality at the coastal town of Amathus. It then provides a hypothesis for the growth of social complexities during the Iron Age, driven by land management. Finally, Kearns contends that the Archaic countrysides of Cyprus also matter to conversations happening amongst scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as broader public audiences, on the seemingly threatening mediations of society and inequality that our current climatic regimes, and the unruly Anthropocene, present.

In this chapter, Kearns traces the novel politics and communities developing in the neighboring Vasilikos and Maroni river valleys, to the east of the town of Amathus. Their commonly described position as a marginal hinterland provides an opportunity to explore rural dynamics at multiple registers. Survey data and rescue excavations form an evidentiary dataset with which to interrogate the generative ties between clusters of settlements and Amathus that produced unruliness across variable and interconnected scales. One critical theme is continuity and impermanence, and the differentiated patterns of access, appropriation, and management taken up by groups returning to sites of prehistoric and protohistoric occupation. Another is social stratification, which entails the development of local autonomous figures, potential community leaders, or members with elevated status. These actors advanced special relationships with Amathusian authorities and local groups through the construction of gathering places such as cemeteries and shrines. The chapter situates these dynamics in habitation, non-quotidian activity, and land use within a framework of a small near-shore world entangling rural sites with maritime economies.

In the introductory chapter, Kearns begins by looking closely at the Idalion Tablet, one of the surviving inscriptions from fifth-century BCE Idalion, on Cyprus, which lists land property in the territory of the town. She uses the inscription to introduce the main themes and arguments of the book. These include a focus on rural settlements and histories to complement studies of urbanism and attention to environmental changes and human experiences with climate through concepts of weathering and unruliness. To build a critical landscape archaeology, the chapter outlines approaches to ancient countrysides and human-environment relationships that push beyond narratives of societal collapse. Kearns also introduces the case study of Archaic Cyprus, a period of transformative social and environmental change, with which she will examine unruly landscapes. The chapter closes with a guide to the remaining chapters as well as a note on periodization.

This chapter provides a review of archaeologies of landscape and outlines where environmental studies reside within these discussions, particularly in the recent rise of climatic and environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean. Through a review of the challenges of environmental determinism and the interpretive problems of studies of the historical forcing of climatic events in human history, Kearns argues for integrated methodologies that look critically at varied scales of evidence and interpretation. In advocating the study of weathered materials and their instrumentality within ancient landscape studies, the chapter engages with recent archaeological scholarship on materialism that analyzes how things act and effect historical change. Kearns contends that differentiated entanglements of communities and their physical, changing surroundings contributed to transformations in social and political evaluations of land, place, and status.