Val di Pesa and Val Orme as a changing rural landscape

The general aim of the project is to investigate changes and continuities of land-use and human activities in the landscape as a dynamic space, which develops interactively with the people inhabiting it. Several objectives will be addressed:

• The changing (or unchanged) nature of rural land use and the processes behind these changes
• Issues of site definition and site classification, especially villas, and the constitution of villa landscapes
• The relationship between the Roman town of Empoli and the valleys of Pesa and Orme
• Differing patterns of use of material culture

The project is chronologically inclusive, examining sites ranging from the Etruscan period to the early Middle Ages, with special focus on late republican and early and late imperial times (150 BC – 400 AD). The project explores processes of transformation during periods of expansion, intensification, consolidation and eventual deconstruction of the Roman rural landscape. Key aims for discussing the character of the landscape are to identify the infiltration/withdrawal of a variety of habits into daily life and the change of patterns relating to the production, distribution and consumption of material culture.

The approach is centred on interdisciplinarity. In order to study land-use and the landscape developments a multi-stage, multi-scalar fieldwork scheme (with built-in feedback loops) will be applied. VOPP will conduct systematic data collection from multiple sources. It bridges the gap between excavation, pottery assemblage analysis, geophysical prospection and systematic on-site surveys with its emphasis on single sites and intensive off-site surveys, extensive-mode survey reconnaissance of the region and geoarchaeological investigations with its much broader regional approach. Further pottery studies and geoarchaeological, archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses will provide important insights into the human-landscape interactions and a reasonable and well founded idea of the demand and consumption at different sites, defining and being defined by their status and function in local networks. 

The application of different models and the transparent discussion and presentation of the methods used in combination with a sophisticated dissemination strategy will make VOPP an important contribution to landscape archeology, survey methodology and analysis of the material culture for research in northern Etruria.