INTRODUCTION

The aim of this chapter is to delineate the long-term settlement history of the Pontine region from the Bronze Age to the Roman Imperial period, in the context of its natural environment. We will first describe the variations in the landscape that conditioned the development of patterns of settlement and landscape exploitation. To this end the results of various pollen cores and sedimentation studies are used that were carried out in the course of the Pontine Region and RPC projects. We will then delineate and evaluate the various land systems that can be discerned in the Pontine region, in order to establish relations between specific environments (mountains, marshlands, river valleys, coastal dunes) and the archaeological record. These relations will then be considered in the overarching framework of core processes studied in the RPC project, highlighting any micro-regional differentiation. We will discuss the socio-economic responses of the Pontine protohistorical communities in the Alban Hills to the process of centralization that started in the Middle Bronze Age, as well as the early urbanization of the volcanic areas during the Late Iron Age and Archaic periods. We will furthermore discuss the Roman colonization that, in an area this close to Rome, possibly started already in the early 5th century BC. The land systems approach that we have adopted here accentuates the fact that these core processes affected each part of the landscape at different times and in different ways. This allows some cautious observations on issues such as continuity and discontinuity, core and periphery relations, micro-regional differentiation in social and economic structures, and changing perceptions of the landscape. We will present the archaeological data in chronological order for each land system, starting with the Bronze Age and ending with the Roman Imperial period. A thematic recapitulation of the dynamics of settlement and landscape in the Pontine region in comparison with the Salento isthmus and the Sibaritide will be presented in chapters five to eight.

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

The study area referred to here as the Pontine region comprises the southern part of the volcanic formation of the Alban hills down to the Tyrrhenian coast, the south-western and western slopes of the limestone massif of the Monti Lepini and Ausoni, and the Pontine plain itself.