The project “Populating Byzantine Southern Italy” aims at using archaeological and related methods for ‘counting’ and characterising the people of Byzantine Southern ltaly. This is a direct corollary from the successful research carried out for the project ‘The Byzantine Heritage of Southern ltaly: settlement, economy and resilience in changing territorial and landscape contexts” (PRIN 2017) that, so far, has a database and GIS for over 2.200 sites.
Whilst in the past work has been done on the social composition of the Byzantine Empire, based largely on written sources, very little work has been carried out on actual numbers of people, that can now be better estimated through the settlements recorded in the database. This, however, means that we need to better characterise settlement types, sizes and dates of occupation, also through field survey and dating techniques. As regards the characterisation of people through archaeology, we need to examine anthropological remains, also as regards pathologies, provenance, and diet, for which we envisage, apart from more traditional anthropological studies, the analysis of stable isotopes and genetic markers contained in the remains. This will be integrated with more analyses of food remains, also trapped as lipid markers in ceramics. Part of the inspiration for this project are the successful analysis carried out on individuals from classical times and from the Lombard cemeteries in northern ltaly and Hungary such as. For instance, Collegno (Turin) and Szólàd. We also envisage paying close attention to the accurate dating of archaeological sites, contexts, people and artefacts, for which reason the project will also engage with precise dating methods and practical applications.