Ancient Landscapes of the Tavoliere, Apulia

ANYONE acquainted with a Mediterranean landscape will know how inbred are past and present in its features. In Apulia, for instance, ancient patterns of settlement have by now vanished into the ground; but life continues over those same sites within a substantially similar, or at least recognizable, physical framework, even though today's pattern of living may be not of long standing. At each stage throughout history different patterns of living were related to the technological, social and political circumstances of the period in question. They were also related to the physical conditions of that period, especially the hydrological ones, a set offactors perhaps too readily accepted as relatively stable. Through settlement and land use, however, direct modification of the biological environment was possible from earliest times through 'hunting, the use of fire for hunting or for plot clearance and ultimately field cultivation and herd grazing'.1 Such modifications have been affecting the Tavoliere environment for approximately the last five or six thousand years. Just how much, however, during this protracted period of appreciable human and human-induced activity, the physical factors of the environment have changed together with, and possibly in relation to, technological and other changes in society, and just how much such factors account for the sometimes dramatic variations in patterns of land use, are the two themes of this as yet uncompleted research. Such man-land relationships, expressed particularly in use of land resources, are supposedly a function of factors of human culture on the one hand and the intrinsic character of the terrain itself. The problem involves the evaluation of the balance of these cultural and environmental factors, consideration of possible weighting by other factors, particularly social or political circumstances, and the deciphering of the processes of change reflected in the landscapes that may have been brought about by alteration in any set of factors, cultural, environmental or political. The Tavoliere of Apulia lies on the sand and clay infilling of a structural depression resulting from the large-scale dislocations involved in the creation of the Mediterranean basin in general and the gulfs of the Adriatic and of Manfredonia in particular. The monotony of this vast plain (4000 sq. km.), the most extensive in peninsular Italy, is relieved by the fragmentation of Pliocene and Pleistocene terraces into low but scarp-edged platforms separated from each other by broad flat valleys. These terraces rise in altitude from the marsh and lagoon-fringed Flandrian plain with its sandy shore towards the erosion surfaces of the Apennine foothills at about 500oo metres, with a rarely perceptible break between the several levels. The climate is essentially Mediterranean too, in that seasonality is of greater biological significance than mere absolutes of temperature and rainfall. Indeed, both thermal and precipitation extremes individualize the continentality of the Tavoliere climate and its classification as a cool sub-arid variant. In relation to climatic aggressiveness, anthropogenic vegetation

Archaeology · Geography · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Archaeological Research and Protection · Medieval Architecture and Archaeology

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