Session: #192

Content:

The Western provinces of the Roman Empire experienced different processes and temporalities of Roman conquest that created diverging ways of understanding these provincial landscapes. In particular, the hodological vision of the republican period has generated perceptions of provincial spaces from the Romano-centric point of view which have defined how the provinces of Sardinia, Sicilia, Gallia, Hispania and Africa are understood. During the Imperialism development, the emergence of new requirements and aims motivated a complete renovation of Roman domains at the end of the Republic started (but not completed) by Caesar. These transformations have been analysed from the perspective of epigraphy, literature, history, and material culture, but has left out the agency of local communities and their impact on the provincial landscapes they inhabited and lived in. In this sense, the potential contributions of landscape archaeology are clear, due to its capacity to identify, analyse and understand changes and continuities on these provincial landscapes, which were intimately linked to the processes of social and political change occurring in the Empire.
This session will focus on the contributions that both landscape studies and landscape archaeology have on the understanding of wider processes developing in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, aiming at generating new insights into how these developed (e.g. their differences and similarities). As such, we welcome submissions exploring the transitions to the Empire in the provincial landscapes of the western Roman Empire (Hispania, Italia, Gallia, North Africa) from both theoretical (e.g. the transformation from hodological point of view to the cartographical vision) and practical perspectives (e.g. settlement patterns, mobility and communication, spatial analysis, remote sensing and GIS).

Session: #192

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