Although nearly all regions of the Roman Empire were targeted by landscape archaeological studies Italy is still the best researched country with regard to the Republican and Imperial countryside and thus most suitable to investigate the question how landscapes ‘became Roman’. In the talk the region of Northern Etruria will be taken as an example and based on results from my own fieldwork the following topics will be discussed:
- the re-organisation of landownership by centuriation and its material consequences
- the intensification of land use by new production techniques etc.
- the integration into an empire-wide exchange system of goods
- the changes of life-styles of the rural population
It will be shown that that ‘becoming Roman’ of landscapes is not a single operation but a longterm process and that it produced – even in a regional perspective – not a uniform solution but resulted in the co-existence of different kinds of landscapes.
