The key structural feature of peninsular Italy is the presence of the Apennines, which run from continental Italy through a length of some 1,000 km, covering a breadth of some 50-100 km across, down to Sicily. The peninsula is thus disproportionately mountainous (less than 20 percent is lowland), where substantial changes in altitude can be encountered over a short horizontal distance. Consequently mountain relief has often contributed to the character and definition of political territories and to the essential regionality of Italy. This mountain chain has also had a profound effect on communications within the country, defining the major routes of access between regions and splitting the two sides of the peninsula. In total, this presence of the mountains provides a longue duree (that is, long-term) setting for human action in the way defined by Braudel and developed by a number of archaeologists for the Mediterranean region.5
This mountain chain forms a continuous and prominent relief from north to south, but is formed of a series of different blocks which have different characteristics. This variability has produced a range of different weathered products that have contributed additionally to the regionality of the peninsula. The same area is also very active geologically, leading to an instability that ranges from the dramatic processes of earthquakes and vulcanism to the more drawn-out but equally imposing processes of erosion and alluviation, which many authors stress took place episodically and thus quite dramatically to the living populations.6 In this fragile environment, humans must be ready to respond rapidly to perceptible local environmental change.7
Neotectonics, that is, the relative youth of mountain building, have led to a considerable verticality of the landscape. Transitions from valleys to mountain summits (between 500 and 1500 m) take place over relatively short horizontal distances and often reach quite substantial heights of 1000-2000 m, and even 2500 m. The relative youth of the landscape has also led to steeper gradients and more constrained width of valleys.8 These constraints have led to pronounced alternation of aggradation and erosion, leading to a cut-and-fill stratigraphy which has both a general pattern (perhaps a result of climatic change) and local variations (perhaps a result of human land use).
World History
