Overview

This book presents a new methodology (the agro-economist approach) for the investigation of human settlement dynamics, focusing on the agro-pastoral exploitation of their landscapes. This approach hypothesises that the changes in the primary economy in early complex societies played a key role in social transformation that led to more complex forms of political organisation. To verify this assumption, a series of landscape archaeological and land evaluation techniques were applied to the territory of Southern Etruria to reconstruct the degree of landscape suitability for agro-pastoral exploitation during the so-called Protourban Turn, i.e. the transition from the village communities of the Final Bronze Age to the first urban centres of the early Iron Age. To investigate this major transformation, a digital predictive model of the landscape was developed, along with a GIS tool capable of calculating, for the area pertaining to each settlement: 1) the extent of woods, pastures, and cultivated fields; 2) the annual food production of both vegetable and animal origin; 3) the maximum sustainable size of the population. Through these data, the socio-political models proposed in the literature up to now were tested, confirmed, and enriched. At the same time, the methodology presented here can easily be applied to other socio-cultural and chronological contexts and as such forms an innovative new resource in the archaeological toolkit.

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