‘Buried Landscapes’ in Southern Italy

Abstract

It is widely known that war-time air photography has led to the discovery of many new archaeological sites of importance in Mediterranean lands. Many hundreds of tumuli have been added to the list, at such famous Etruscan cemeteries as Cerveteri and Tarquinia and complete systems of Roman land-partition by Centuriation have been identified round the coloniae of Iader and Salonae, on the shores of Dalmatia. But by far the most notable discoveries of all are those on the Foggia Plain, in the Province of Apulia, in Southeast Italy. Great numbers of Prehistoric, Roman, and Medieval sites are being identified, and some preliminary results have already been published in ANTIQUITY(' Siticulosa Apulia ', December 1946). Select examples were exhibited at the Classical Conference at Oxford and at the British Association Meeting, in 1948, and again for several months this year, in the Ashmolean Museum. These were chosen from a number which it was fortunately possible to acquire for the University of Oxford, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where they are being studied in detail. This collection was based on vertical photographs taken by the Royal Air Force, and oblique photographs taken by Major Williams-Hunt and myself (which were the first to reveal this dense concentration of sites, spread more thickly on the ground than almost anywhere else in Europe). This heavy concentration is of much more than local importance. During the last few years I have examined many thousands of air photographs of Southern and Central Europe taken at various seasons, in the course of my research. While these provide much interesting data and give us, as it were, an illustrated ' Domesday ' survey of Europe in the middle of the 20th century (of capital value to Anthropology), in no other area has there as yet been anything approaching the quantity of crop-marks, grass-marks, soil-marks and earthworks which have come to light in Apulia. There are various reasons for this and a detailed account must await a later report. For our present purposes, it will be enough to single out one or two areas, for comparison.