Intra-regionaal vergelijkend onderzoek: surveys in de Pontijnse moerassen (Italië)

Samenvatting

Intra-regional comparitive research: surveys in the Pontine marshes (Italy). The article describes a PhD project that builds on previous landscape archaeological research by GIA in the Pontine region (Lazio, central Italy). Within the project, the settlement history of the three main landscape units of the Pontine region (the coastal area, the mountainous inland area and the intermediate plain) is studied for the period 500–0 BC. Whereas field surveys had already been done in the coastal and mountainous parts, the lower plain had not yet been studied in much detail. The plain is notorious for its poor drainage conditions; it is also known as the palude pontine, the Pontine marshes. It was subject to drainage works during the rule of Mussolini in the 1930s, but according to historical sources also in Roman times. Other indications of Roman occupation are traces of a Roman land division system, the Via Appia and the road stations along it, as well as several small rural sites. Fieldwork has recently started on a selected part of the plain fieldwork has recently started; a first step was the creation of a digital elevation model of the landscape as it was prior to drainage works in the 1930s which more closely than the actual landscape resembles the ancient landscape better than the actual landscape. Next, systematic surveys were started. These surveys have so far not yielded much evidence of occupation in the plain, but they did locate several previously unknown sites along the Via Appia and on the inner edge of the coastal terraces. Further surveys will have to show whether these finds represent an early Roman system of settlement along the margins of a cultivated plain.