The survey indicates marked continuity in rural settlement around Tuscania from Etruscan times into Roman Early Republican period (c.300-170 BC: 212 sites), implying that there was minimal disruption to pre-existing systems of ownership following the subjugation of the area by the Roman army. There was a dramatic expansion in rural settlement, a filling-up of the countryside particularly in formerly under-developed areas away from the town. This growth was encouraged by a better communications network, especially by the upgrading of the Via Clodia.There were increased levels of investment both in the town and in the surrounding countryside. Maximum site numbers developed in the Later Republican period (170-30 BC: 230 sites), and on the evidence of intensive grid collection of surface remains at selected sites, and geophysical survey at others, the core buildings of agrarian units first reached their maximum extent at this time. However, there is little evidence for large slave-run villas producing goods geared primarily for export and displacing the free peasantry, despite the written sources emphasizing this process throughout Italy at this time: the countryside around Tuscania was dominated by small farms and villages, and high-ranking sites did not bring significant changes to long-established farming regimes.

The project’s results indicate that a landscape once dominated by small, family-run, farms, each cultivating small plots of land, gradually transformed through the three phases of the Roman imperial period (Early, 30 BC-AD 120: 205 sites; Mid, AD 120-260: 174 sites; Late, AD 260-440: 146 sites) into one featuring large agricultural estates involved in extensive farming practices. In light of historical records it seems likely that affluent investors bought up much of the land of failing smallholders, expanding the capacity of their own agricultural enterprises and leasing out properties to poorer farmers. Local wealth, power, and influence became concentrated in the hands of a limited number of elite landowners. Yet despite this process, small low-status sites remained the most abundant class of rural habitation even in the Late Imperial period and many middle-ranking sites endured without a break in occupation even into Late Antique times (AD 440-700: 77 sites in total). The resilience of wide sections of the rural community, even in the face of external threats from Longobards and others, should not be underestimated, but significantly a considerable proportion of Tuscania’s hinterland of cultivated fields had reverted to scrub and woodland by the Late Antique period.

This chapter investigates the interplay of textual and non-textual features in the marking systems of three types of clay products widely used in Roman Italy during the first three centuries CE ‒ fine tableware (sigillata), shipping containers (amphorae), and bricks and tiles. The semiotic flexibility of the footprint as a polyvalent sign indicating both authorship and identity is illustrated by its use as a stamp on Roman tableware. The marks employed on amphorae to identify different phases of the manufacture, transport, and distribution of the vessels or their contents reveal a well-defined taxonomy of textual and atextual signs differentiated according to medium, placement, and stage of application. Brickstamps on larger bricks at Rome combined texts with semantically distinctive figured symbols (signa) in complex messages that identified brickyard owner, manufacturer, and origin; smaller bricks, when marked, bore distinctive patterns of atextual designs created by matrix. Atextual marking systems operated both together with and independently of textual markers, offering different advantages of utility (visual comprehensibility without need of literacy) and facility (being easily constructed out of everyday objects) in return for less semantic precision and differential range.

This paper aims to present a general overview of the distribution of Medieval pottery finds, such as fine wares, amphorae and coarse wares, in the southern Adriatic region. The focus will be on excavated pottery finds from sites on the Albanian coast (Butrint, Saranda and Durrës) and those from sites across the Adriatic in southern Italy, especially from the Salento region. The comparison between ceramics found on these opposite coastal regions with similar looking examples from other sites in the eastern Mediterranean sheds new light on trade and distribution patterns in the southern Adriatic from the seventh to the fifteenth century.