Meaningful Places: Intertwined Identity and Environment in Archaic Rome

This project will investigate how people and environments shaped each other as Rome emerged as a place and a community in the sixth century BCE. It will integrate archaeological material, paleoenvironmental evidence and topographical data through a theoretical framework of 'ontopology', which asserts that people and landscapes evolve

together, to study three Roman pre-urban areas and their physical modifications by archaic settlers. Subsequently, through examining these modifications' recollections in the late-republican literature, it will interrogate why and how the Romans reaffirmed their connection to their archaic landscape centuries later, to understand the centrality of

human-environment interconnectedness in modern urban identities.