INTRODUCTION

The Salento Isthmus is located in the south of modern Apulia; it is the common name for the stretch of land between Taranto and Brindisi that connects the Salento peninsula to the rest of Italy. Its highest part is the Murge plateau, an undulating tableland which averages about 400 m above sea level. The other major physio-geographical units of the isthmus comprise the much dissected marine terraces near Taranto in the south-west, and the gently undulating coastal plain near Brindisi in the south-east, which is part of the larger so-called piana messapica.

In the present chapter we will first discuss environmental studies that shed light on landscape formation processes in Salento in general and on the impact of human interference on them. We will focus on the human factor as our main theme. To that purpose we will evaluate the relevant archaeological data, and in particular the various systematic surveys and topographic prospections carried out on the Salento isthmus. In the last decades, the isthmus has witnessed an increase of surface prospection, ranging from judgmental site-oriented topographic research in the Forma Italiae tradition to systematic intensive line-walking of specific sample areas. Of these, central to the RPC project are the intensive surveys carried out in the context of the ongoing research program of the Archaeological Centre of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (ACVU). This project started in the early 1980s with the aim of studying the process of Romanization and was later extended to analyse Greek colonization and subsequent urbanization processes as well. The survey results have been published in monographs and preliminary reports. They offer not only the possibility of verifying the data provided by less systematic prospections, but also of building working hypotheses regarding the relation between regional settlement dynamics and social processes relevant to the present study.

The archaeological field work of the ACVU on the Salento isthmus has been closely integrated with geographical research, carried out first by the Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit, and subsequently as part of the RPC project (fig. 3.1). Besides studying the evolution of the physical landscape, a major goal of this research was to define the characteristics of the principal land systems of the Salento isthmus (on land systems in general see section 1.2.1).