Archaeologists still know very little about settlements and land use in Central-Adriatic Italy in the
centuries before the Roman conquest in 268 BC: most information about Bronze and Iron Age (ca.
2000-268 BC) communities in this part of Italy comes from rich burials and surface artefacts. This
project aims at filling this lacuna by mapping case-study areas where archaeological traces can be
expected on the basis of previous observations in rescue operations and archaeological surface
surveys. Three archaeological issues will be investigated during three fieldwork campaigns: the
location and character of Bronze and Iron Age settlements, the detection potential of archaeological
remains by non-invasive prospection techniques, and the spatial organization of pre-Roman
habitations and territories.
The project will contribute to the development of techniques to detect pre-Roman remains. The
selected areas will be mapped without excavation: remote-sensing techniques including aerial
photography, digital terrain models, geophysical surveys (georadar and geomagnetics) and
systematic surface artefact recording will be used. Such techniques are frequently used by
archaeologists in Mediterranean landscape studies, but rarely on prehistoric remains, and an
assessment of their application in prehistoric studies is highly needed. The high-resolution maps
produced in the project will be verified by targeted coring.