Regional Demographic Trends and Settlement Patterns in Central Italy: Archaeological Sites and Radiocarbon Dates

Context These datasets were collected as part of the scope of the project “Changing the Face of the Mediterranean” and currently represent the largest repository of archaeological data for central Italy from the Late Mesolithic (ca. 8,000 BC) to the fall of the Roman Empire (500 AD). This project aims to reconstruct long-term trends in population dynamics and vegetation change from the introduction of farming to the Medieval times (ca. 10,000–1,000 BP), on a pan-Mediterranean scale, in order to assess the relationship between human population dynamics and accompanying transformation of the Mediterranean environment. The project compares radiocarbon dates, archaeological survey data and pollen records from several case study regions over the longue durée [1]. The dataset discussed here forms one of the six case studies of the project. Central Italy’s long history of extensive archaeological excavations and systematic survey projects (e.g. Forma Italiae Project by the Istituto di Topografia [2], Tiber Valley Project by the British School at Rome [3], research by the Archaeological Superintendence of Lazio and Tuscany, etc.) make this region an unusually privileged case study for assessing demographic trends and settlement patterns across space and time (Figure 1). Most of the studies we synthesise here were first stimulated by the work of Ward Perkins who introduced the modern landscape archaeology to central Italy [4–5]. The Institute of Topography of the Sapienza University of Rome renewed the territorial research in Lazio and Tuscany with the Forma Italiae’s project, a large-scale complete archaeological map and gazetteer of Italy composed of 46 volumes published between 1926 and 2017 [6–8]. Furthermore, the Roman school of preand proto-history promoted territorial and spatial studies with particular emphasis in the transition from the smaller-sized dispersed hilltop villages (those generally about 2–3 ha in size) of the Final Bronze Age (1175/1150–1020/950 BC) to the larger proto-urban centres (50–200 ha) distributed over the lowlands and plateaus [9–10]. Given the high intensity of archaeological research in Italy, here we offer the first systematic study and collation of settlements and radiocarbon data from a wide range of published sources arranged in a spatial database.