Le ville tardoantiche della Lucania. Genesi e trasformazione di un modello insediativo e di organizzazione territoriale

The transformation process and the time frame of rural areas between antiquity and the early Middle Ages find in the settlement structures represented by villas a privileged standpoint for understanding the anthropic landscape. Namely, the investigation of late-antique villas in Lucania, thanks to significant survey projects supported by preventive archaeology interventions, is now providing an interpretative framework that sets the villas at the core of economic recovery processes of the territories between the mid-3rd and 5th centuries AD and, subsequently, of functional reuses and structural conversions between the 6th and 7th centuries. The rise of villas as mansions of potentiores and administrative headquarters for directing and managing the production of larger estates characterizes with some continuity the transitory phase between antiquity and late antiquity, but sometimes the settlements themselves reveal the persistence of settlement choices at least until the first half of the 7th century, although other factors and different functions condition their structures. A synthesis of the data acquired so far can now offer effective tools for framing the territory of Late Antique Lucania as representative of these issues.