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The Changing Landscapes of Rome’s Northern Hinterland. The British School at Rome’s Tiber Valley Project

Since the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s, we have lost a truly inordinate amount of archaeological information, particularly from around the major cities. The results of projects such as the South Etruria Survey, on lands to the north of Rome, thus become all the more valuable. Although now easy to forget, modern field survey and, indeed, Italian medieval archaeology, owe a great debt to John Ward-Perkins’ ground-breaking project. One of the strong points of his South Etruria Survey, but something omitted by various other surveys, was the concomitant attention paid to fieldwalking and to hidden depths of meaning in the portable finds, particularly ceramics. The attention to detail established at the very beginning of that project, decades ago, permits revisions such as those so splendidly presented in this book. Although commencing with the Bronze Age, almost a third of this monograph concerns the gradual transformation and breakdown of a Roman agrarian system and the rise of new estates, settlements and territories that were to form the basis of Rome’s growth in the later Middle Ages. Indeed, one of the great strengths of this study is the continuing consideration of how the data can enlighten our views of the ups and downs of Rome itself. For instance, the city’s struggle to survive the troubled decades during and after the Gothic Wars and following the Lombard invasion of AD 568/9, also in the interests of far-away Constantinople, makes interesting reading (Ch 6). Population figures had dropped substantially and the modest material culture, even compared to what was available for the early 6th century, helps illustrate the criticality of the times that Pope Gregory I so eloquently wrote about and attempted to thwart. Life, nonetheless, continued, buttressed not only by the Church, but also by direct intervention of the Byzantine authorities. The later 7th and early 8th centuries, unfortunately, still remain quite obscure. By that time monetary exchange, then confined to the urbs, was disappearing, as was Byzantine dependence as, perhaps necessarily, Rome became ever more self-sufficient. It was in that environment that the papacy made great headway, strengthened by an alliance with the Carolingian Empire, enabling a political break from Byzantium. Archaeologically, new two-storey elite residences appeared within the walls, while a few papal estate centres (domuscultae) and hilltop sites figured in the countryside. Pottery (and probably most else) was almost exclusively made locally, albeit by specialised hands; the only immediately recognisable class is the ceramica a vetrina pesante, a thick lead-glazed ware (known in English as Forum Ware), that has been a godsend in helping archaeologists recognise early medieval activity. As Helen Patterson writes (p 301), it is a story that evolves ‘from the late antique landscapes of villas and farms to the medieval landscapes of the castelli’. On a methodological level, Robert Witcher’s important reconsideration (pp 60–73) of how to employ finds for establishing more telling settlement chronologies, is well worth reading. The Tiber Valley Project has entailed restudying all the pottery and the recalibration of previous site chronologies. It is fascinating and admirable work. While benefitting our knowledge of the Tiber Valley, it leads one to reflect upon how objective are conclusions drawn from other field surveys in Italy where more effort is often taken in locating artefact scatters than in trying to fathom their true significance in writing history. This is thus not a book for hunting down material parallels, whether of sites or ceramics, but one of maps and graphs, based on solid statistics. Even if details are presented elsewhere (see