Nicola Terrenato

Italy and the West : comparative issues in Romanization

Nineteen papers examining varied responses to Romanization, and how this affects our view of the development of the Roman Empire. The traditional view of the Romanization is as the triumph of a superior and more advanced culture over primitive communities that was brought about by military expansion and which resulted in the creation of a very uniform political and cultural entity. It is only in the last twenty years that the variety of responses that Romanization elicited among the various ethnic groups, social classes, genders, spheres and even within the same person in different conjunctures of his or her life have begun to be appreciated. This new perspective has deep implications for our perception of Roman imperialism. The aim of this collection of papers is to further understanding of Romanization at a formative stage; early Roman expansion in Italy. There is much evidence for bi-directional negotiation between Italian communities and Rome. Understanding the motivation of the Italian peoples to become part of a new political entity is crucial to knowing how Roman Italy was kept together for more than half a millennium. Seven papers also examine responses to Romanization in other areas of the empire.

Visibility and Site Recovery in the Cecina Valley Survey, Italy

Abstract One of the key issues in survey methodology today is the relationship between surface visibility and the discovery of archaeological sites on the landscape. As part of the Cecina Survey in central Italy, a treatment of visibility, which includes aspects of both geomorphology And ground cover, is developed in order to evaluate the strength of this relationship in quantitative terms. The results at Cecina show a strong positive relationship between visibility and site recovery. The spatial variation in visibility and its differential effects on site recovery over the landscape have deep implications for the analysis and interpretation of site distributions recovered during the course of the survey. An attempt is made to introduce a way of correcting for problems of visibility of this kind, concluding with a discussion of some of the wider implications of the results for the planning and conduct of surveys and for the interpretation of their results.

A monumental mid-Republican building complex at Gabii

Excavations at the Latin city of Gabii in 2012–15 conducted by the Gabii Project have uncovered a monumental building complex, hitherto known only very partially from previous excavations in the 1990s. Organized on a series of three artificial terraces that regularized the slope of the volcanic terrain, it measures some 60 m by 35 m, occupying an entire city-block. It is prominently situated at one of the most central locations within the city, on the main urban thoroughfare at the important intersection of the roads from Tibur, Praeneste and Rome. Stratigraphic evidence and construction techniques date the original phase of the building to the mid-third century BC. This report focuses on a contextualization and description of this first, mid-Republican phase and offers a preliminary interpretation of this complex as a public building, with spaces designed for a variety of functions: bathing, public feasting, and ritual activity. If this is correct, it now represents one of the very few examples of public buildings other than temples and fortifications known from the mid-Republican period, and sheds important light on the development of Roman architecture and of the Latin cities in a crucial and obscure period.

Rome in its setting. Post-glacial aggradation history of the tiber river alluvial deposits and tectonic origin of the tiber island

The Tiber valley is a prominent feature in the landscape of ancient Rome and an important element for understanding its urban development. However, little is known about the city’s original setting. Our research provides new data on the Holocene sedimentary history and human-environment interactions in the Forum Boarium, the location of the earliest harbor of the city. Since the Last Glacial Maximum, when the fluvial valley was incised to a depth of tens of meters below the present sea level, 14C and ceramic ages coupled with paleomagnetic analysis show the occurrence of three distinct aggradational phases until the establishment of a relatively stable alluvial plain at 6–8 m a.s.l. during the late 3rd century BCE. Moreover, we report evidence of a sudden and anomalous increase in sedimentation rate around 2600 yr BP, leading to the deposition of a 4-6m thick package of alluvial deposits in approximately one century. We discuss this datum in the light of possible tectonic activity along a morpho-structural lineament, revealed by the digital elevation model of this area, crossing the Forum Boarium and aligned with the Tiber Island. We formulate the hypothesis that fault displacement along this structural lineament may be responsible for the sudden collapse of the investigated area, which provided new space for the observed unusually large accumulation of sediments. We also posit that, as a consequence of the diversion of the Tiber course and the loss in capacity of transport by the river, this faulting activity triggered the origin of the Tiber Island.