The Spatial Structure of a Pre-Roman Highland Fortified Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper presents a transferable approach developed to study the highland fortified landscape of the pre-Roman Samnite society during the first millennium BCE in central Italy. It integrates extensive primary data acquisition through LiDAR-based remote sensing with spatial statistics to identify the subsistence strategies and cultural reasons behind the structuring of the mountain landscape, thereby providing new data to interpret the socio-political organization of Samnite society. LiDAR was employed to create a new, more representative dataset of hillfort sites across 15,300 sq. km of the Apennine region, addressing legacy and recovery biases. Point process models were then used to investigate a series of environmental and cultural covariates, combining data on elevation and topsoil properties at a European scale. These were integrated with the study of clustering or dispersion in the settlement pattern to highlight possible spatial hierarchies among the sites. Together, these techniques and fresh evidence shed new light on the non-urban character of Samnite society, contributing to the deconstruction of urban-centric biases in the traditional historical narrative and instead highlighting the importance of pastoralism in the creation and structuring of this Mediterranean highland fortified landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Interdisciplinary Approaches to Landscape Archaeology - Part 2   •
• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51312