The cultural relevance of this process has never been questioned, but the same is not true for its genetic legacy. Geographic and climatic constraints are introduced as significant factors in the analysis, which leads to the conclusion that many of the ditches at Metapontion and Herakleia served to drain or irrigate the landscape as a means of improving its agro-pastoral potential.Visiting the ancient theater of Syracuse, the temples of Agrigentum and Paestum, or any of the archaeological museums in Magna Graecia, it becomes obvious the substantial impact the Greek colonization of the archaic age has had on the artistic and cultural heritage of the Mediterranean. Then the evidence from the two well-documented colonial territories-the aerial photographs over the Metapontino and the Herakleia Tablets-is re-examined and re-interpreted in the light of ancient geometric knowledge and surveying techniques. After an examination of the aerial photographic record over the majority of the Greek colonies, in order to define the set of potentially organized landscapes, and a review of the previous scholarship on the colonial landscapes of southern Italy, revealing its strengths and weaknesses, the dissertation assembles the evidence for the types of man-made features present in a Greek territory. Consequently the question of function(s) has been addressed only sporadically, in part because the role of the climate and geography of southern Italy has long been undervalued. In their attempts to explain the often puzzling intervals and orientations of the linear features at Metapontion and Herakleia, the geometric arguments have achieved a complexity and abstraction that far exceed the knowledge of mathematics and geometry-both theoretical and practical-possessed by the Greeks in the Archaic and Classical periods. The existence of 'geometric' arrangements of roads and ditches-i.e., features appearing in parallel and/or perpendicular sequences-in the territories of Metapontion and Herakleia, documented respectively by aerial photographs and inscriptions, has directed most scholarly interest to their geometric properties, rather than to their functions and significance. In the past 50 years topographers and archaeologists have documented numerous anthropic features in these territories, such as roads and ditches, so that it is by now generally recognized that Greek colonists organized their territories, to some extent, in order to increase the efficiency of agricultural and pastoral activity and therefore increase the overall productivity of the territories.

Abstract: This dissertation is a first attempt to redefine the study of the agricultural territories, or chorai, attached to Greek colonies in the southern third of the Italian peninsula (Magna Graecia).

This dissertation is a first attempt to redefine the study of the agricultural territories, or chorai, attached to Greek colonies in the southern third of the Italian peninsula (Magna Graecia). الموضوع : Archaeology Ancient languages Geography Ancient civilizations الجامعة : The University of Texas at Austin عنوان الرسالة : Landscape organization in Magna Graecia, 301 pages

Magna graecia landscape