Craft Production and trade in the central Italian countryside: Approaches and first results of the Minor Centers Project

In Roman Italy, small rural centers (villages, fora, stationes, and sanctuaries) are likely to have been important reference points for the rural population. Archaeologically, such minor centers are not well-known: few are excavated, and in field surveys they are rarely recognised or discussed in detail. The five-year project ‘Fora, stationes and sanctuaries, the role of minor centers in the economy of Roman central Italy’, funded by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), is based at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology of the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). It explicitly addresses the issues highlighted above: it aims to understand the role of minor centers in the rural economy. The project uses two approaches, a top-down and a bottom-up one. The top-down approach entails a study of the economic geography of central Italy, looking at settlement patterns and infrastructure. The second, bottom-up approach aims to provide new and detailed data on several minor centers and their specific economic functions. This entails new fieldwork in the Pontine Region south of Rome, and forms a new phase in the long-running Pontine Region Project.