Abstract
This paper investigates the settlement developments of the landscape around the ancient town of Venusia in southern Italy using legacy field survey data. A Latin colony was established here in 291 BC and also other subsequent Roman colonization movements are known from the literary sources. As in many other Roman colonial landscapes, trends in the settlement data of Venusia have previously been linked to the impact of Roman colonization, which is usually understood as a drastic transformation of the pre-Roman settlement landscape and land use. Rather than using theories on Roman colonial strategies for explaining possible settlement patterns (deductive approach), this paper presents an alternative, descriptive, bottom-up approach, and GIS-based inductive location preference analysis to investigate how the settlement landscape evolved in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (particularly in the fourth–first century BC). Following closely the settlement choices from the pre-Roman conquest period onwards and assessing patterns in continuity and change in the settlement record, we demonstrate that pre-Roman rural settlement and land use strategies were not eradicated but instead strongly determined the location preferences for later settlements in the “colonial” periods. If these settlement trends can be related at all to the colonization waves mentioned in the ancient literary sources, the conclusion should be that Roman colonization did not lead to radical landscape and land use transformations, as has traditionally been suggested. Instead, an organic and complementary rural infill over time is documented, in which cultural factors instead of land use potential played a key role.
Highlights
The formation of early Roman colonial landscapes has often been reconstructed using literary evidence on Roman colonization strategies, which for the most part was written after the Civil Wars
Contrary to what has been proposed in previous debates on Roman colonization, our analyses have made clear that the pre-existing settlement organization had a determining role in the development of colonial period settlement strategies
The gradual and adaptive settlement development in the colonial landscape we saw, certainly challenges the conventional notion of a radical break with previous settlement organization and its settlers. This more adaptive and organically growing settlement scenario might explain the presence of localized densities of Republican settlements at the margins of the pre-Roman settlement system we noted in previous work
Summary
The formation of early Roman colonial landscapes has often been reconstructed using literary evidence on Roman colonization strategies, which for the most part was written after the Civil Wars (first century BC). A different approach to understanding colonial settlement strategies is offered, using a GIS-based quantitative and qualitative analysis of settlement behavior and location preferences in the colonial landscape of Venusia. This paper complements and further expands the research strategy outlined in a set of previous articles, which have, instead, focused on settlement pattern analysis and deductive reasoning (Casarotto et al 2016) and survey. It offers a useful approach to use legacy, site-based datasets for territorial investigations. The aim here is to move from point observations to area-based interpretations of the ancient settlement processes underpinning site configurations, to get a firm grip on the evolution and morphogenesis of the landscape as a whole (see discussion in De Guio 1985)
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