The Ancient Rural Settlement Structure in the Hinterland of Pompeii Inferred from Spatial Analysis and Predictive Modeling of Villae Rusticae

Abstract

Pompeii, buried by the explosive A.D. 79 eruption of Somma‐Vesuvius, is one of the most studied ancient cities in the Roman world. However, until very recently, the rural settlement in its hinterland had been largely ignored by systematic archaeological research. The ancient landscape around Pompeii consisted of a dense network of Roman farms (villae rusticae). They are believed to have played a vital role in ancient rural life and economy and thus represented the interactive rural–urban relationship in the Sarno River plain. The systematic investigation of published work combined with new fieldwork has yielded a data set of 140 villae rusticae in the Sarno River plain. Geographic information system based spatial statistics as well as predictive modeling were applied to gain a more detailed understanding of the ancient rural settlement structure in relation to the underlying paleoenvironmental and socioeconomic conditions. A high‐resolution pre‐A.D. 79 paleolandscape model of the Sarno River plain was utilized. The aim of this paper is to address theoretical considerations, the methodological implementation, and the archaeological discussion of the analysis of the ancient rural settlements and agriculture around Pompeii.

Palaeosols and their cover sediments of a glacial landscape in northern central Europe: Spatial distribution, pedostratigraphy and evidence on landscape evolution

“…The topographic relationships and spatial dimensions (area size and shape) of palaeosols were estimated using a geo-statistical approach developed by Vogel et al (2016). It is based on the empirically calculated spatial relationship between the find locations of palaeosols as a dependent variable and the digital elevation model (DEM)-based relief attributes as independent variables.…”

The pre‐79 CE alluvial environment south of Pompeii's city walls

“…The reconstruction of the environmental conditions in the area between the ancient city of Pompeii, the Sarno River's meander belt and the sea has long been the subject of scholarly debate (see Barra et al, ; Cinque & Russo, ; Furnari, ; Pescatore, Senatore, Capretto, & Lerro, ; Pescatore, Senatore, Capretto, Lerro, & Patricelli, and references therein; Stefani & Di Maio, , ; Vogel & Märker, ; Vogel & Märker, ; Vogel, Märker, & Seiler, ; Senatore, Ciarallo, & Stanley, ; Vogel, Märker, Esposito, & Seiler, ). In efforts to understand the ancient environment, a large quantity of information was gathered using geomorphological and geognostic surveys that included core drillings.…”

State of the Art in Paleoenvironment Mapping for Modeling Applications in Archeology—Summary, Conclusions, and Future Directions from the PaleoMaps Workshop

“…For example, digital elevation data of different origin and on different scales are utilized to derive topographic indices describing certain processes or characteristics of geomorphologic, geologic, climatic, hydrologic, vegetation or strategic circumstances [33][34][35][36][37][38]. In three case studies from Italy (see Figure 6) and Eastern Africa, we illustrate what DEMs, remotely sensed data, detailed terrain analysis, data mining technologies and geophysical methods tell us about Landscape pattern and how their integration might help to understand, and to reconstruct paleo-landscapes [34,[39][40][41][42].…”