Geoarchaeological study of abandoned Roman urban and suburban contexts from central Adriatic Italy

Over the past 15 years the Potenza Valley Survey project investigated Iron Age to Medieval settlement dynamics in the Central Adriatic Potenza Valley. Part of this research focuses on the Roman abandoned towns of Potentia and Trea by performing an integrated geoarchaeological study of their townscape. This largely noninvasive research consists of remote sensing analysis, geophysical surveys (magnetometry, electrical resistivity, and ground-penetrating radar), and geomorphological fieldwork such as microtopographic measurements and hand augering. The chosen techniques depend on the nature of each town and are integrated with more traditionally achieved research data. This paper presents the main interdisciplinary results of work on these two Roman towns and highlights the importance of obtaining complementary data and performing hand augering as a stratigraphic control of the remote sensing and geophysical results. Insights into the character and layout of the cities, the structural influence on the surrounding area, and the human-environment interactions and dynamics through time of both Roman cities could be achieved. Moreover, the results offer guidelines for conservation strategies of these abandoned towns and their suburbium, which are necessary to protect them from present-day threats such as agriculture and tourism. In this way the paper offers an insight in the tremendous potential of well-integrated geoarchaeological investigations of partly or fully abandoned urban contexts in the Mediterranean area and beyond.