Description: The broad valley of the Bradano river and its tributary, the Basentello, separates the Apennine mountains in Lucania from the limestone plateau of the Murge in Apulia in southeast Italy. This book aims to explain how the pattern of settlement and land use changed in the valley over the whole period from the Neolithic to the late me
Brief description: Alastair Small FSA, FSAS, is Professor Emeritus of the University of Alberta, and Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University, School of History, Classics and Archaeology. He began studying the archaeology of South Italy in 1964 as a doctoral student at Oxford University, and has published extensively on the subject. He has edited and contributed largely to monographs on excavations on Botromagno near Gravina in Puglia, and at Monte Irsi and San Giovanni di Ruoti in Basilicata. These range in date from the Early Iron Age to Late Antiquity. In 1996 he and Carola Small initiated a ten-year project of field survey in the Basentello valley which explores the territorial context of Botromagno and Monte Irsi, and led to the first phase of excavation at Vagnari. Carola Small is Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta where she taught Medieval History for almost 30 years and, since retirement in 1997, Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research work was initially in Later Medieval France though she has also published articles on 13th century South Italy based on documentary evidence. Since 1980 she has joined her husband Alastair Small on his archaeological expeditions. Her interest in surface survey began with exploring the area round his excavations at San Giovanni di Ruoti and after retirement she became involved in the field survey presented as the core part of this book, taking over much of the direction of it when he opened up a dig at Vagnari in the survey area. She also studied the medieval documentary evidence for the survey area and its environs.