The nEU-Med Project: archaeology of a coastal district in Tuscany during the early Middle Ages

The archaeological investigation carried out at the early Medieval site of Vetricella (Scarlino — Grosseto, Tuscany) and in the adjacent Cornia and Pecora river valleys, with its multidisciplinary approach, represents the core of a wider European Research Project (ERC Advanced) entitled nEU-Med: “Origins of a new economic union (seventh–twelfth centuries): resources, landscapes and political strategies in a Mediterranean region”. The project, developed between 2015 and 2021, aimed at reconstructing, through the archaeological record and from a Mediterranean perspective, the times and means through which a sample portion of the mid-Tyrrhenian Italian landscape, part of the so-called “Colline Metallifere” district in southern Tuscany, passed from the “crisis” of the post-classical period to the economic revival of the twelfth century. The historical landscape that emerged in Tuscany from that very process took on the form of municipal cities and commercial networks, the latter especially through maritime trade (see, for instance, the growth of Pisa and its leading role in the eleventh and twelfth centuries), revealing a territory strongly enmeshed in the complex but homogenous set of relations that constituted the western Mediterranean. By comparing recent historiographical hypotheses with previously established ones, the ERC nEU-Med project sought to identify the material traces pointing to a long-term process already taking place in the eighth–ninth centuries and that gradually, through new stimuli occurring in the tenth and eleventh centuries, led to that aforementioned development. Over a five-year period, the research attempted to answer historical and methodological questions, including: what territorial transformations stimulated or were in some way tied-in to changes in social and settlement structures? Which proxies and multidisciplinary approaches can be used to acquire the information necessary for a more accurate historical-environmental reconstruction? The research project has tried to find these answers by investigating a key territory, part of the wider northern Maremma region, through a series of methodological approaches. The study area comprises the valleys crossed by the Cornia and Pecora rivers (respectively, the Val di Cornia and Val di Pecora) and the adjacent coastline that constitutes the Gulf of Follonica. These broad plains, now intensively cultivated, were characterized in antiquity by lagoons and marshlands, intertwined with fertile lowlands suitable for cereal crops. Behind the plains rise the hills of the Colline Metallifere, rich in forests and mineral resources, in particular mixed sulphides of lead, copper and silver, as well as iron hydroxides. This territory and the crucial role played by its strategic resources over a long period of time have given rise to a series of historical-archaeological investigations that highlighted its outstanding potential for the analysis of settlement, mining, and metallurgical dynamics in pre-industrial times: a long tradition of studies carried out by universities and institutions through excavations, territorial surveys, landscape reconstruction, and historical-documentary research.