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).

The survey indicates marked continuity in rural settlement around Tuscania from Etruscan times into Roman Early Republican period (c.300-170 BC: 212 sites), implying that there was minimal disruption to pre-existing systems of ownership following the subjugation of the area by the Roman army. There was a dramatic expansion in rural settlement, a filling-up of the countryside particularly in formerly under-developed areas away from the town. This growth was encouraged by a better communications network, especially by the upgrading of the Via Clodia.There were increased levels of investment both in the town and in the surrounding countryside. Maximum site numbers developed in the Later Republican period (170-30 BC: 230 sites), and on the evidence of intensive grid collection of surface remains at selected sites, and geophysical survey at others, the core buildings of agrarian units first reached their maximum extent at this time. However, there is little evidence for large slave-run villas producing goods geared primarily for export and displacing the free peasantry, despite the written sources emphasizing this process throughout Italy at this time: the countryside around Tuscania was dominated by small farms and villages, and high-ranking sites did not bring significant changes to long-established farming regimes.

Before our project Etruscan Tuscania was best known for its great family tombs with inscribed sarcophagi of the 4th-2nd centuries BC, but the survey evidence shows that the Etruscan landscape was most densely settled in the 6th century BC (219 sites), coincident with the process of urbanization. The frequency of ‘off-site’ material indicates that Etruscan agricultural activity extended over the greater part of the surveyed area. Little survives of the remains of the Etruscan town, but the richness of Etruscan material immediately south of the city walls indicates a suburban extension of it. The development of Tuscania implies that the control of minor centres by major centres (or rather, the control of less powerful by more powerful families as social and economic inequalities became increasingly marked) was one of the earliest features of Etruscan urbanization. The Archaic Etruscan phase was followed by a marked, though not dramatic, population decline in the Later Etruscan phase (129 sites), the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Activities at Guidocinto, a small but long-lived Etruscan farm we excavated near Tuscania, included the production and processing of oil, wine, and wool, products that enhanced elite lifestyles and provided them with valuable resources for exchange and trade.

The project’s results indicate that a landscape once dominated by small, family-run, farms, each cultivating small plots of land, gradually transformed through the three phases of the Roman imperial period (Early, 30 BC-AD 120: 205 sites; Mid, AD 120-260: 174 sites; Late, AD 260-440: 146 sites) into one featuring large agricultural estates involved in extensive farming practices. In light of historical records it seems likely that affluent investors bought up much of the land of failing smallholders, expanding the capacity of their own agricultural enterprises and leasing out properties to poorer farmers. Local wealth, power, and influence became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of elite landowners. Yet despite this process, small low-status sites remained the most abundant class of rural habitation even in the Late Imperial period and many middle-ranking sites endured without a break in occupation even into Late Antique times (AD 440-700: 77 sites in total). The resilience of wide sections of the rural community, even in the face of external threats from Longobards and others, should not be underestimated, but significantly a considerable proportion of Tuscania’s hinterland of cultivated fields had reverted to scrub and woodland by the Late Antique period.