GNGTS 2015 - Atti del 34° Convegno Nazionale

Introduction. The Institute for Archaeological and Monumental Heritage IBAM-CNR and the Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Salento have been put in charge, together with other Institution of the PRIN project “Innovative Methods for the Reconstruction of the Landscape of Terra d’Otranto between Late Antiquity and Middle Ages”. One of the aims of the project is the characterization of some archaeological contexts in the Salento area, corresponding to the southern part of the Apulia Region, in Italy. In particular, ancient villas, rural settlements and places of worship by the archaeologists in the last few years, as a whole showing that during the Late Ancient Age and Early Medieval Age the landscape in this area was essentially characterized by Roman latifundia . In detail, in the area showed in Fig. 1 the archaeologists performed deeper investigation which provided large information about meaningful landscape transformations, such as changes in cultivations, building of new villages and abandonment of pre-existing ones, foundation of new towns (Arthur, 2006, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). In particular, the 6 th centuryA.D. was a moment of intense social and territorial transformation, due to several reasons among which a relevant role was played by the war between Greeks and Goths occurred in the period between 535 and 554 A.D. In the last 15 years medieval archaeologists at University of Salento studied the pattern of early medieval rural settlements through surveys and excavations. For the 7 th and 8 th centuries the archaeological record shows a heavy fragmentation of the rural habitat, organized in small villages and farms (Arthur et al. , 2008, 2011). One of them, identified and excavated at Loc. Scorpo near Supersano, was characterised by residential buildings made of non-durable materials. Another context of interest in this framework is Contrada Badia (Melissano, 1990), close to the modern town of Cutrofiano . Some years ago in this area, preliminary aerial photographic investigations and archaeological surveys led to the identification of subsequent phases of frequentation dating back from the Bronze Age (fourteenth-eleventh century B.C.) up to the fifteenth century A.D. (Greco and Lapadula, 2014). A dense scatter of ceramics is located on a 6 hectares plateau: the archaeological record gives evidence of human frequentation in the area during the Hellenistic period and, after a hiatus in the Republican phase, it displays a substantial continuity in the management of rural landscape from the Roman Imperial to the Byzantine period. Late Antique occupation of the site is testified by a large series of finds, such Fig. 1 – Left hand panel: The three rectangular areas in Badia, prospected with a GPR. Rigth hand panel: the four rectangular areas in Badia prospected with a magnetometer. GNGTS 2015 S essione 3.2 89