Etruscan Towns, Roman Roads and Medieval Villages: The Historical Geography of Southern Etruria

Abstract

The vital part played by geography in determining the course of human history is a fact so obvious and so universally recognized that it is easy to forget how recent this recognition is, and in how many fields its consequences still await even the most elementary application. In Britain, and in general in the countries of north-west Europe, where the absence of written record and the poverty of the sur? viving remains have served as a powerful incentive to the development of precise archaeological and related techniques, we are apt to take for granted the historicogeographical methods of which Cyril Fox's The archaeology of the Cambridge region (1923) and The personality of Britain (1932) are the great pioneering landmarks, and we find it hard to realize what large fields of human history there are to which these methods have as yet hardly been applied. Nowhere has this been truer than in the classical lands of the Mediterranean world. There we are faced with the other side of the coin: the literary record is altogether too full, the monuments are too rich. A few of the phenomena of geographical change, such as the deforestation of Greece and southern Italy or the desiccation of parts of the Ancient East, are so insistent, so far-reaching in their results that they cannot be overlooked. But they are excep? tional, and even they still await the detailed treatment that they so richly merit. In general, students of the classical world have been content to project back into anti? quity the sort of geographical conditions which we see around us today; and it only needs a moment's reflection upon what has happened elsewhere during the last two millennia to realize how very far wide of the mark such an assumption may prove to be. During the last six years the British School at Rome has been engaged in a pro? gramme of field survey in southern Etruria, in the area that lies immediately to the north of Rome, between the Tiber and the sea. The original purpose of the survey was one of record, namely to map and to describe the remains of antiquity of all periods within an area where, as a result of modern agricultural policies and methods, antiquities of all sorts are very rapidly disappearing. At a very early stage, however, it became evident that the mere compilation of topographical data, how? ever useful to future researchers, was not enough. It left unanswered almost all the questions to which historians might hope to receive an answer. What are the reasons for many of the seemingly quite arbitrary features of the resulting maps? Why does the pattern of settlement change from one period to the next? How did the inhabi? tants of the successive settlements live? What did their fields produce? Where did their roads go to, and why? To these and to a host of other questions it soon became apparent that answers could only be given if at the same time one were to try to reconstruct, period by period, as detailed a picture as possible of the geographical setting within which these events took place and by which they were so manifestly conditioned.