AdriatiCo - Productions and trades in the development of the Adriatic communities from the Classical period to the Roman age: processes of assimilation, integration and transformation

The goal of the research is to explain the origins of the historical development of the different cultural and political identities that led to the formation of shared values underlying European integration in the Picene and Illyrian-Epirote areas by extending our knowledge of the economy and trade in the central and southern Adriatic between the Classical Age and the end of the Roman Era. This objective will be pursued through a multidisciplinary study approach that will lead to the reconstruction of cultural and commercial dynamics occurring in those territories since the Classical age and until the Roman period by studying the archaeological and archaeometric aspects of goods and their circulation by sea. The latter, pottery production in particular, analysed primarily in terms of diffusion and then as the mirror of economic and commercial relations among the different territories, records the information on the cultural and technological levels reached by a population, as well as provide chronological data and geographical correlations between different cultures. Archaeometrical characterization of selected samples from both the Adriatic areas, will be relevant to understand the cultural exchanges and the commerce routes in this area. An Open Source WebGIS will be used, in a first step, for the entry of new data and permitts to mapping any type of information that has geographic coordinates. The close interdisciplinary links between archaeology, chemistry and geology, and information technology will allow the creation of a database for the materials circulating in the Adriatic area and the organization and dissemination of data using a WebGIS platform will highlight the informative potential of pottery as an exceptional indicator in the reconstruction of trade trends. The GIS system allows to put all these informations on a geographic map and cross eachother overlapping an information to an other. Through the application of this innovative system the survey of levels and categories of contact between the different cultures and communities gathering in the territory in question will be analysed on the basis of the production system and trade, with the aim of clarifying the different ways in which the various forms of cultural transmission, assimilation and integration took place in the territories concerned.