The villas of Lazio at the end of Antiquity

Cristina Corsi

The villas of Lazio at the end of Antiquity: Settlement, production, culture

Authors

Cristina Corsi

Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6582-5033

Keywords:

Late Roman and post-classical villas, Lazio, Tuscany, settlement patterns transformation, Christianisation of the countryside

Synopsis

Publishers: EUC-Edizioni University of Cassino

Series: Miscellaneous

Pages: 317

Language: Italian

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/resolver.pl?nbn=urn:nbn:it:unina-29742

Abstract: In recent decades archaeological research has progressively revealed phases of occupation or frequentation of rural settlements after their periods of construction and floruit, sometimes extending into the early Middle Ages. These acquisitions have progressively eroded the idea that the Peninsula’s countryside was deserted after the crisis of the third century AD and have shed new light on post-classical agrarian landscapes. Indeed, the study of the so-called rustic villas at the end of Antiquity leads to the understanding of the lifestyle, material culture and forms of livelihood, and often clearly illustrates how allogeneic peoples “infiltrated” communities definable as autochthonous. Lazio offers an excellent casuistry, both of archaeological sites that have been known for some time and have been the subject of long-standing research campaigns, and of recently acquired contexts, from which extremely interesting new findings can lead to essential observations on the theme of “daily life in villas”. It has thus been decided to offer a review of some of the most illustrative case studies, comparing data from the southern part of the region and from Sabina with the neighbouring region of Tuscany.

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Author Biography

Cristina Corsi, Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale

Cristina Corsi is Associate Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the Department of Humanities, University of Cassino. She is Marie Curie fellow and research associate at the Laboratoire d’Archéologie Médiévale et Moderne en Méditerranée of the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme in Aix-en-Provence. From 2007 to 2013, she was Visiting Director of Research at the Portuguese University of Évora. She has won numerous post-doctoral fellowships and has been a visiting researcher at prestigious institutions in Europe and the USA. She has been coordinator of international and European projects (most recently ‘Radio-Past’ Marie Curie-IAPP; ‘The Ammaia project’ FCT Portugal), and partner in numerous international projects (most recently, HosperAnt - École Normale Superiore Lyon - École Français Rome). She authored, co-authored or edited numerous publications, monographs and articles in international journals. In particular, she is the author of two monographs on the road network and infrastructure of Roman Italy and medieval Latium (Oxford 2000; University of Tuscia 2012), a monograph devoted to the modalities of medieval travel and, in particular, that of Archbishop Sigeric at the end of the first millennium (Oxford 2022), and a volume with the results of a fifteen-year excavation at the Roman city of Ammaia in Lusitania (Ghent 2014). He has edited important international conferences (Dalle sorgenti alla foce. La valle del Liri-Garigliano nell’antichità; Changing Landscapes. The impact of Roman town in the Western Mediterranean; Urban Landscape Survey in Italy and the Mediterranean), the volume presenting the results of the survey in Ammaia (Gent 2012) and the Springer volume on Good Practice in Archaeological Diagnostics (Springer 2013). Her main scientific interests gravitate towards the archaeology of Mediterranean landscapes in the long term, and more specifically to communication networks in antiquity and the Middle Ages. She studies landscape transformations and is a specialist in urban archaeology city and ancient and medieval town planning. She is internationally recognised as an expert in archaeological diagnostics.