A return to Rocca San Silvestro: community health, safety and resilience in a medieval mining village

The development of the international project "Pursuing Public Health in the Preindustrial World, 1100-1800," funded by the Australian Research Council (DP220102914), offered the Siena Unit research team the opportunity to investigate the topic of pre-modern public health, so far largely centred on cities, by studying the case of the rural community that lived in the medieval mining castle of Rocca San Silvestro. The project initially focused on applying the most updated methodologies to the study of the burials excavated in the site's cemetery in the last decades of the last century, during the archaeological investigations directed by Riccardo Francovich. Later, the research was extended to the site and its surrounding territory, using geochemical, archaeobotanical and archaeozoological analyses with the aim of gaining a deeper knowledge of the site and its relationship with the landscape and its resources (mining, forestry and agricultural). The paper discusses the research strategy adopted in relation to the historical questions involved in this ‘return to the castle’, and the methodologies applied in the different fields of investigation.