Slope Failure and the Archaeological Record of the Middle Sangro River Valley, Abruzzo, Italy: Working towards An Understanding of Archaeological Site Formation, Preservation and Interpretation of High-Relief Mediterranean Valley Systems

The Sangro River runs from the mountainous upland plateau of central Italy to the Adriatic Sea. The area roughly corresponds to the territory of ancient Samnium, an area controlled by the Samnites until their complete assimilation into the Roman Empire in the first century BC. Historically, this area has received little archaeological attention as the Romans wrote of the area as backwoods and insignificant. However, the past two decades of preliminary archaeological research indicates that the region played a much larger role in the cultural development of the Italian peninsula than was previously assumed. The Sangro Valley Project, an Anglo-American landscape archaeology project, is furthering our understanding of this increasingly important region by investigating the dynamic relationship between changing social behaviors and the natural landscape of the middle valley through time. The coupling of geomorphological and archaeological surveys of the middle valley suggests that slope failure processes dominate the physical landscape. Any interpretation of the archaeological record must take into account the scale, frequency and type of landslides that occur in modern times as well as the past. The multi-survey analysis reveals that slope failure is responsible for not only the placement and engineering of domestic and agricultural centers but also site formation, preservation, and interpretation of survey and site data. This study has far-reaching implications for archaeological projects throughout the Mediterranean as many regions exhibit similar geomorphologic profiles.