ABSTRACT
Writing the history of settlements and landscape is necessarily a multidisciplinary exercise. The image we have of any particular city and countryside at a point in time depends for its definition on the interpretation of archaeological data in the light (or with the support) of the terminology used in written documents. Genuine multidisciplinarity is a relatively recent phenomenon. On the one hand, especially in Italy, but more generally too, archaeologists used to invoke written sources merely to give appropriate names to their finds (Tabacco 1967: 67–110) or to build models of different settlement patterns; on the other, historians used to cite archaeological data simply to reinforce with material evidence hypotheses based on written sources. Recently, thanks to trends in historiography, the conjunction of archaeologists and historians has produced more sophisticated interpretations of both written and material sources: no longer are these seen as simple mirrors of reality, providing historians with documents of ‘what happened’, and archaeologists with fixed chronological data, but as cultural products revealing a society’s prejudices and projects, models and behaviours. Charters, for instance, apparently bone-dry legal documents, are no longer read as objective and impartial records of truth, and the vocabulary of settlement they present, however limited, is seen to have different meanings in different social contexts, times and spaces (Halsall 1995; Augenti 2015) – just as a golden brooch found in a grave doesn’t simply show the social rank of the individual buried there, but instead suggests the aspiration of his/her family to be associated with an aristocratic elite.
