Project Aims

To achieve a holistic understanding of the Sangro River Valley’s past and modern landscapes (c. 10,000 BC to AD 2000) and the human activities that took place within them, SVP research specialists employ a combination of spatial data at the landscape/regional scale, detailed information about settlement activity via a representative sample of sites of assumed different functions (habitation, ceremonial, etc) and scales, and paleoenvironmental landscape reconstruction. Archaeological, geophysical, geological, and geomorphological data are being combined in an ongoing study of a series of transects across the Sangro Middle Valley.

Current Project aims and objectives

i)  Investigation of rural settlement, culture, land-use and environmental reconstruction of the Archaic period in the Acquachiara area surrounding Monte Pallano

ii)  Modelling of a pagus-polity (Monte Pallano) and its territory in the context of the regional ‘Samnite social and cultic landscape’

iii) Re-assessment of Roman-period occupation and land use to create a more finely textured history of occupation than the current general picture in this part of Italy

iv)   At all periods the interaction of the study region in wider regional and Mediterranean processes and mobility

v)  Use of a range of techniques to examine a full range of evidence, faunal beside palaeo-botanical, excavation and remote sensing beside excavation

vi) Marriage of geomorphological/geological work with siteless survey to understand taphonomy and post-depositional change in the creation of the texture of surface data assemblages

vii) Development of a flexible model that integrates various types of spatial data to predict human activities and settlement patterns