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.

Our survey revealed very few sites belonging to the Early Medieval period (AD 700-1000) apart from Tuscania, indicating a combination of population decline and abandonment of the countryside for the security of the town. There was significant demographic growth in the High Medieval period (AD 1000-1200): 38 sites, together with 30 sites with ‘generic Medieval’ material likely to belong to this phase. The new foundations, distributed throughout the survey area, comprised nucleated but unfortified settlements, a habitation form about which the documentary record is largely silent. In the Late Medieval period (AD 1200-1500: 16 sites), new foundations were established within a few kilometres of Tuscania with little evidence for settlement in the countryside beyond. Most farmers preferred to live in defensible castelli, or within the vicinity of Tuscania. As elsewhere in Italy, the second half of the 2nd millennium has witnessed the increasing abandonment of many small farms by peasant (contadini) families in the face of urban growth and industrialization, with globalization in recent decades accelerating their replacement and absorption by agribusinesses, and the flight to the countryside by middle class commuters from Rome.

No attempt to evaluate the longue durée of human settlement can ignore the environment as both a formative influence and as a cultural artefact. The environmental programme of the project collected data to complement the regional geomorphological and palynological record on patterns of landscape change in response to climate change and the influence of human activities. The geomorphological fieldwork focused on the catchment of the Marta river that flows from Lake Bolsena past Tuscania to the Tyrrhenian sea near Tarquinia. The Late Glacial environment c.15,000 years ago consisted of a steppe landscape.After a sedimentary hiatus in the Early and Mid Holocene, sediments started to be laid down again in the Later Etruscan period c.500-300 BC, reflecting the extensive nature of Etruscan agriculture.Significant human impacts began in the Roman Republican period. Then and during the Early/Mid Imperial periods the Marta and other rivers in the area were unstable braided and wandering gravel-bedded rivers quite unlike the modern rivers. Their dynamism largely reflected a colder wetter climate than today but also woodland clearance and increased arable cultivation.This combination pre-conditioned the landscape’s sensitivity to alluviation in the Late Medieval and Post Medieval periods.

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).

Though not prolific, our prehistoric material both significantly amplifies our knowledge of the prehistory of the study area and informs on wider debates about settlement trends prior to Etruscan urbanization.Palaeolithic finds were very sparse, but the area was occasionally visited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the Early Holocene (9700-6200 BC) even though its volcanic soils were heavily wooded. The first farming communities (Earlier Neolithic, c.5500-4500 BC: 10 sites) consisted of small residential units of one or two households. The Later Neolithic (4500-3500 BC: 15 sites) data fit the regional evidence of increasing complexity and social inequality.Site numbers doubled in the Copper Age (3500-2200 BC: 30 sites) and doubled again in the Earlier Bronze Age (2200-1400 BC: 62 sites) but these societies remained small scale, living as individual households or in small clusters. The same rural structure continued into the Later Bronze Age (1400-950 BC: 53 sites) but above it Tuscania’s Colle San Pietro acropolis developed as a nucleated and probably defended hilltop community.The process of nucleation accelerated in the Iron Age (950-700 BC: 16 sites). Tuscania was probably in a subordinate relationship to Tarquinia, one of five ‘super-centres’ that developed into the major Etruscan cities of South Etruria.

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.

The primary technique employed in the project was ‘field walking’: systematically collecting archaeological artefacts lying on the ground surface, especially in ploughsoil.The method has been widely employed by archaeologists working around the Mediterranean to map past settlement especially because of the suitability of its semi-arid landscapes for this kind of ground searching.An apparently simple technique, systematic archaeological survey in fact has to deal with a wide range of biasing factors as every stage, so this chapter describes the decisions we took and the methods we employed, and assesses their implications for the quality of the information retrieved: defining the study area (totalling 353 km2);the employment of three sampling methods (Transect, Random and Judgement, totalling 97 km2) to survey the landscape; the decisions we took about the intensity of search and artefact collection methods (41.5 km2 were searched) and about defining ‘sites’- assumed foci of activity -versus ‘off-site’ or sporadic material thought to indicateland use activities such as manuring; and in our subsequent analyses of the materials collected, the methods we used to try to minimize the biasing effects of the surface archaeology of different periods of the past being differentially prolific and/or differentially visible.