The impact of later Republican colonisation on coastal settlement dynamics in central Adriatic Italy : the case of Potentia

The study of the formation and growth of colonial landscapes in central Adriatic Italy may well contribute to a better understanding of the lasting Roman impact on conquered societies in Italy as a whole. The first phase of Romanisation, especially coinciding with the later centuries of the Republic (third to first centuries BC), and culminating in the reign of Augustus, is essential to deciphering forms of transmission, assimilation and cultural integration. This phase is marked by an impressive influx of colonists from Latium and other Italian regions into the central Adriatic area, and by the introduction of urban ways of life modelled on Rome and central Tyrrhenian Italy. But it is also in these three first centuries of Roman dominance in the region that a diversity of interesting agglomerations and urban forms is being created, by a heterogeneous group of indigenous populations and immigrated individuals who deeply integrated their new habitation centres in the gradually changing surrounding territories and landscapes, stretching between the central Apennine mountains and the Adriatic Sea. To illustrate this, we will focus on landscape change in the crucial contact area between the coast and one of the most important valley corridors linking Rome and Latium with its Adriatic borderland during this last part of the Republic. Based on a recent analysis of urban developments in the whole central Adriatic region, as well as on intensive archaeological field surveys in the Potenza valley, we can start to reconstruct the main features of the Roman colony of Potentia in northern Picenum and its steering role in marked landscape change and settlement dynamics that occurred in this part of central Adriatic Italy. The sudden creation and relative fast development of such Roman colonial towns on the coast has, together with the impressive influx of viritim and veteran colonists, created a real and dynamic colonial landscape with a highly organized urban centre, a well-structured suburbium, (temporary) villages or hamlets, and isolated farms, which all play their role in a complex changing world