Terrestrial communication networks and political agency in Early Iron Age Central Italy (950-500 BCE): A bottom-up approach

Introduction

Transportation infrastructures are the outcomes of social interactions and interactions between societies and environments. Particularly, terrestrial routes can be considered as the result of the interplay of multiple factors: they are essential for permitting inter-settlement cooperative processes (information exchange, trade and defence) and, at the same time, they need some level of cooperation to be established (e.g. Trombold 2011 (1991) for the New World and Laurence 1999 for the Roman world). However, since their creation and maintenance require a not negligible amount of resources, they are affected by competing interests. We can think of each connection between a pair of places as the result of a negotiation that involves the two actors but that can also be influenced, to some extent, by ‘third parties’ as, for instance, a political authority acting on a higher level. The importance of such systems is self-evident: they influenced the development of past societies enhancing trade dynamics and affecting the prosperity of a civilization and its complexification (e.g. emergence of‘urbanism’, see Earle 2011(1991) and Lay 1992 and/or ‘Romanization’, see Laurence 1999). Summarizing, terrestrial routes or terrestrial transportation infrastructures both shaped and were shaped by the societies who created them and the environment in which they existed in a very clear example of feedback loop.

In the past, terrestrial transportation routes, especially Roman roads with their clear and imposing monumental appearance, have been the focus of traditional topographical research and landscape archaeology both at the centre (e.g. Forma Italiae volumes published by the Roman topographic school led by Castagnoli and later Sommella or the ATTA - Atlante Tematico di Topografia Antica - and Latium Vêtus volumes curated by Lorenzo and Stefania Quilici Gigli) and at the edges of the Empire (e.g. contributions in Koschick 2004 or Rathmann 2006). However, regional and/or supra-regional studies specifically focused on terrestrial transportation systems have been less common (see e.g. Dorsey 1991; Kolb 2004; Carreras and De Soto 2010; Nakoinz 2012b; Block and Beck 2017). In addition terrestrial transportation systems have been studied to understand

Networks and agency in Iron Age Italy 197 better trade opportunities and relationships in the past and develop interpretations and theories on the origin and development of ancient economies (e.g. McCormick 2002; Adams 2012).

On the contrary, the study of terrestrial transportation systems for understanding the political and social organization of the communities that created and maintained them has been pioneered only by a few scholars (e.g. Chevallier 1976; Taylor 1979; Crumley and Marquadt 1987; Purcell 1990 and Mattingly 1997 on the Roman Empire and its provinces; Laurence 1999, on Roman Italy; Nakoinz 2012a on Pre-Roman Europe; Potter 1979; Boitani 1985; Izzet 2007 and recently Tuppi 2014 on Etruria; and Trombold 2011 (1991), followed more recently by Jenkins 2001 and Smith 2005 for the New World). Recently Irad Malkin has adopted a network perspective as a methaphor and as an heuristic concept as he has compared the polycentric maritime network of Greek cities and colonies to the centralized road network of the Roman Empire (Malkin 2011), but narratives on European terrestrial transportation systems have rarely adopted a comparative perspective and especially a quantitative approach to substantiate it.

Only recently new studies conducted in regions of Pre-Roman and Roman Europe (e.g. De Soto and Carreras 2013; Groenhuijzen and Verhagen 2016; Filet 2017; Volkmann 2017; Faupel 2018; Faupel and Nakoinz 2018) and also in Pre-Roman and Roman Italy (e.g. Fulminante et al. 2017; Prignano et al. 2019; Matteazzi 2017) have shown the potential of novel quantitative studies based on Network Science approaches and/or GIS applications and have shown that this is indeed a growing and important field of research (see e.g. recent projects such as ORBIS by Stanford University, http://orbis. stanford.edu/orbis2012/, or the New Transhumance project in Toscana; Pizziolo et al. 2016 or Mercator E-Project in Spain http://fabricadesites. fcsh.unl.pt/mercator-e/).

Summarizing, terrestrial routes both shaped and were shaped by the societies who created them and the environment in which they existed in a very clear example of feedback loop (Fulminante forthcoming). Therefore, understanding the development of terrestrial transportation and communication infrastructures in a region provides insights into its social and political functioning. To better understand emerging Latin and Etruscan urban polities and their interactions we modelled their terrestrial infrastructure networks to explore the underlying mechanism of their creation and maintenance.