The archaeology and social significance of drove-roads

Drove-roads have always been lines of transport not only of animals, but also of other commodities and goods as well of ideas. In many cases these trailing routes have in fact been the predecessors of later roads which were built directly on top of them. Thus, they served almost identical purposes as their successors and shared their function as the (quite literally) mediator between different regions. The transhumant way of life is very well attested in central and southern Italy from at least Roman times onward up into modernity. The itinerant herdsmen and their flocks were in the course of their movements constantly "crossing boundaries" and therefore are the ideal object of study when investigating cultural exchange. The aim of the study is to reconstruct ancient drove-road systems, investigate their age and courses. If it can be shown that a network of ancient drove-roads existed in Southern Italy already in archaic times, then old, and often implicitly used assumptions about the mechanisms and character of "Hellenization" of the indigenous tribes have to be challenged. The means by which this goal is to be achieved is GIS modelling. Relevant features, both archaeological as well as natural, shall be investigated and mapped. On this basis, combined with the scientific assessment of the character of a large body of sites and objects and their distribution, possible drove-road courses shall be modeled and made object to critical analysis. The result will be a diachronic system of indigenous movements. With this new body of evidence, the high at least seasonally mobility of indigenous people can be contrasted very sharply against the apparently rather stable and almost seemingly introverted territorial pattern that is suggested by archaeological research concerning the Greek poleis in Magna Grecia: Cities that were surrounded by rather short strips of (agriculturally) cultivated soil, with the limits of the chora marked by sanctuaries. The model of a transhumant indigenous way of life seems instead to be the exact opposite: Here a larger part of the population (and not only tradesmen) was on the move throughout the landscape, maybe even actively supplying the Greek cities with pastoralist products in exchange for Greek objects. In this model, not the Greeks, but the indigenous side would have been the main actor of "acculturation", thus leading to a radically new, but most likely much more appropriate picture of culture change.

Within the project, new approaches have been developed for the detection and assessment of the importance of mobile livestock keeping for prehistoric southern Italy. These were tested on case studies. The material evidence of migrating pastoral communities is of ephemeral and perishable nature. Therefore, within the framework of the project, an approach was developed to recognize such communities by other indicators: a) size and structure of basic social units, b) internal organization of and relations between these units c) considerations for the general demographic structure and their implications for possible non-sedentariness or migrating pastoralism. In contrast to earlier approaches, characteristics of the material culture (objects, iconography) were only regarded as secondary evidence, because of the fact that they cannot clearly be linked to pastoral societies. Ethnological and ethno-archaeological studies from different cultural contexts were analyzed and shared cultural characteristics of these communities were identified. The criteria derived on this basis were applied to the southern Italian, Archaic site of Ripacandida (6th /5th century BCE) where only burial evidence has been found and contemporary architectural structures are absent. The analysis revealed that the structure of the local community shows many features of mobile pastoral societies. It additionally proved likely that the site seems to have changed from an area of brief stopover to a permanently populated intermediate stay. Parallel to this development, the egalitarian family group structure altered, in favor of male individuals enjoying over-familial authority (pastoral camp headmen?) acting as representatives of regional authority (chiefs?). Within the project time also preliminary studies were undertaken in the nearby area of Venosa to reconstruct possible pastoralist routes (drove-roads) by using GIS calculations (least cost path analysis). The zone was chosen because it presented the best regional inventory of known archaeological sites. The analyses were realized in cooperation with specialists of the Institute for Spatial Information and Surveying Technology (i3) at the University of Mainz. Some of the routes modelled on this basis were checked during the project period. The studies will be continued further after the end of the project funding and further investigation and the modelling of routes are planned.