Les régions italiennes actuelles des Pouilles et de Basilicate — l’Apulie et la Lucanie romaines — sont depuis longtemps au centre des recherches archéologiques menées par les classicistes et archéologues canadiens. Le « San Felice Project » représente un prolongement des fouilles dirigées par Alastair et Carola Small dans la vallée du Basentello, dans la partie occidentale de l’Apulie. Leur objectif est d’approfondir notre compréhension des villas et des domaines impériaux dans cette portion de la péninsule italienne. Le présent rapport propose un survol de six années de recherches sur le site de la villa impériale ancienne de San Felice, élément d’un domaine impérial qui comprenait le site du vicus voisin à Vagnari. Ces recherches incluent un relevé de terrain exhaustif, une prospection géophysique, un chantier de fouilles et des données d’archéologie environnementale.
Archaeological data for the transformation of late Roman rural landscapes in Southern Italy over the sixth to eighth centuries AD are often meagre. This record often provides little explanatory power in the context of understanding the collapse of Roman political and economic hegemony and the framework for the regeneration of these relationships in the early medieval countryside. Resilience thinking offers a robust suite of heuristics to help guide both method and theory in understanding the key socio-environmental relationships involved in this transformative process based on limited material evidence. Through insights gained from developing a panarchic perspective of the Basentello landscape between AD 300 and 800, both capacities for and strategies of resilience to landscape-scale shocks and stressors emerge as key patterns in this collapse process. To explain how these patterns emerge, resilience thinking employs narratives from complexity science by framing landscapes as self-organizing complex adaptive systems. It is through appreciating this complexity that archaeologists can revolutionize how we understand landscape-scale transformations, the role of resilience in landscape history and, more broadly, the nature of societal collapse.
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