Fontana, Giacomo; (2023) Computational and landscape approaches to Samnite mountain society in the 1st millennium BCE Mediterranean. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text GiacomoFontana_Thesis.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 January 2025. Download (17MB)

Abstract

The role of cities in our modern society shapes our view of the possible ways past communities organised themselves. However, not all complex societies revolved around cities, even in heavily urbanised areas like the Mediterranean. One such example is the Samnites, a non-urban mountain society that inhabited the Apennine region of south-central Italy during the first millennium BCE. Despite their organisation being noticeably different from their urban neighbours, they exhibited unusual social, political, and military resistance to the emerging Roman Republic that scholars still struggle to explain. For a long time, the narrative on the Samnites has been biased by urban-centric and historiographical views that rendered material evidence subservient to aprioristic models. When archaeological research finally recognised the fallacy of the dominant narrative, it did not fully engage with the ongoing global discussions about hillfort communities, leading to a focus that remained largely regional. This Ph.D. dissertation is unusual in that it deconstructs modern assumptions by taking a quantitative approach to investigate the complex phenomenon of non-urban organisation. It draws from recent global debates on hillfort communities to develop a transferable approach that integrates extensive fieldwork with spatial and non-spatial computational methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to address long-standing debates on the nature of Samnite hillforts and the society that constructed them. This original approach and fresh perspective highlight the more heterarchical nature of Samnite society and how warfare likely served as a catalyst for socio-political change, leading to a rapid increase in political centralisation and even state formation, despite the absence of urbanism. Importantly, the entire computational approach was designed to be replicable and suitable for cross-regional and cross-cultural analysis of hillfort communities. This opens up new and exciting possibilities to test whether identified patterns are contingent on Samnite society or if we can trace them in other hillfort communities across time and space.

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