‘Regional Pathways to Complexity’ was the short title for a project covering the long-term archaeology of three regions in Italy. It began in late 1997 and is now, more than a decade later, completed with the publication of this synthetic volume. The full title of the project was Regional Pathways to Complexity, Landscape and Settlement Dynamics in early Italy, and its primary aim was a multidisciplinary and comparative assessment of processes of centralization and urbanization in three Italian landscapes during, roughly, the 1st millennium BC. Particular attention was paid to the internal social dynamics of the regions investigated and, correspondingly, to local responses to and interaction with the process of Greek and Roman colonialization.

In the archaeology of Italy from the Bronze Age to the Roman period, the study of the internal development of indigenous Italic societies and landscapes has remained a relatively underdeveloped area. This is due to the emphasis on explanations relying on external factors (the influence of non-Italic cultures), dominant historical processes (the Greek and Roman colonizations), and a traditional culturehistorical view of society (stages of growth, flowering and decline). Much attention has been lavished on the influence on regional Italic cultures of foreign artefacts and manufacturing techniques during the ‘Mycenaean’ and Graeco-Roman periods, when contacts of trade and exchange ranged throughout the Mediterranean. Similarly, interest in Greek and Roman colonization, mainly based on historical sources, has dominated over the study of the role of native cultures. This one-sided approach has led to the view that the early urbanization of central and southern Italy has been a relatively homogeneous process, in which the role of international impulses and colonization movements has been paramount.

Accordingly, the aim of the RPC project has been to demonstrate both the more complex nature of the archaeological reality, and the significant perspective offered by regional archaeological landscape studies. This was done by comparing the development of indigenous societies in central and southern Italy through the 1st millennium BC until and including their incorporation into the Roman state.

The regional perspective of the RPC project fits in with a well-established tradition of regional projects in Dutch archaeology. In 1996 this interest gave rise to a new research programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), on ‘Settlement and Landscape in Archaeology’.