The South Etruria Survey area is a landscape of deep historical palimpsest, its fields and volcanic tufa ridges bearing the subtle scars of millennia. This is not a single site but a vast, ploughed archive. Here, in the territory once controlled by the formidable Etruscan city of Veii, pioneering field archaeologists from the British School at Rome spent decades walking the land. From the 1950s, their meticulous collection of broken pottery and building debris on the surface rewrote the history of the Roman countryside. They revealed a densely populated, dynamic world of farms, villas, and roads, a far cry from the romantic, empty wilderness often imagined.
In the late 1990s, a new generation returned with the Tiber Valley Project, revisiting these same fields. Their work linked the old, hand-drawn scatter plots to modern GIS technology, deepening our understanding of how settlement patterns shifted from the Etruscan period through the Roman Republic and Empire and into the Middle Ages. The result is a quiet, scholarly revolution: a narrative of a working landscape, read from the pottery shards and tile fragments left behind.
Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.
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