Vortrag: From Etruscan to Roman? Changing landscapes in Northern Etruria

12.06.2019

Prof. Günther Schörner talks about ‘becoming Roman’ in ancient Northern Etruria in course of the international conference 'The Impact of Empire on Roman Landscapes' at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz in Germany.

Although nearly all regions of the Roman Empire were targeted by landscape archaeological studies Italy is still the best researched country with regard to the Republican and Imperial countryside and thus most suitable to investigate the question how landscapes ‘became Roman’. In the talk the region of Northern Etruria will be taken as an example and based on results from my own fieldwork the following topics will be discussed:

  • the re-organisation of landownership by centuriation and its material consequences
  • the intensification of land use by new production techniques etc.
  • the integration into an empire-wide exchange system of goods
  • the changes of life-styles of the rural population

It will be shown that that ‘becoming Roman’ of landscapes is not a single operation but a longterm process and that it produced – even in a regional perspective – not a uniform solution but resulted in the co-existence of different kinds of landscapes. 

Antike römische Limitatio im Umfeld der heutigen Stadt Empoli am Fluss Arno in der Toskana (nach Ristori 1980 | Dominik Hagmann 2019 | CC BY 4.0)

Antike römische Limitatio im Umfeld der heutigen Stadt Empoli am Fluss Arno in der Toskana (nach Ristori 1980 | Dominik Hagmann 2019 | CC BY 4.0)