Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss Lynch’s elements of the city (Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes and Landmarks) and use them to analyze the interaction between urban and rural landscapes

Paper long abstract:

Lynch's (1960) concepts of the legibility of the city have been applied to reading the development of the roofscapes of Carthage and Beirut (Mills 2006). Lynch's five elements, Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes and Landmarks, have proved a useful tool for the reading of the ancient city (e.g. Bayliss 1998, Malmberg 2008). In this paper the use of legibility has been extended analysing ceramic material (pottery and building materials) recovered from field survey to characterize the constructed Roman rural landscape. This proved a useful framework in order to conceptualize the relationships between physical landscape, cultural constructs and surface survey material when interpreting the Roman ceramic material from the Nepi Survey Project. This project carried out a programme of fieldwalking in the territory of ancient Nepet (modern Nepi) north-west of Rome in 1999 and 2000. The application of Lynch's elements, combined with the methodological tools of functional pottery analysis, made it possible to define and analyze the geographical tensions affecting the manufacture, use and discard of ceramic materials and hence explore the interaction between this town and its setting with the wider trading networks of the empire from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD.