Site location and resources exploitation: predictive models for the plain of Grosseto. Archeologia Medievale

This paper focuses on a small area north-west of Grosseto, near the central western Italian coast, and on a short time-span: the early middle ages (6th to 10th centuries AD). We compare and integrate literary sources, archaeological data and the environmental context to study the settlement pattern and the resource exploitation. In particular, our goal was to investigate the presence of salt extraction activity. This paper is a follow up of Citter, Arnoldus-Huyzendveld 2012, where we studied the south-eastern portion of the plain. In this case, we have the same goal, but we shall apply a different method and refer to a shorter time-span. The environmental analysis puts literary sources and archaeological data in their proper context, raising more questions than before. In the conclusion, we shall outline some general remarks about the concept of predictive models in landscape archaeology. We propose a broader and more flexible definition, focused more on the questions and goals than on the procedures and the methods applied. This allows us to avoid the constraints of inductive-quantitative approaches, which have proved to be of limited practical use for landscape archaeology.