Territorial occupation and defensive models in Chaonia and the Drino valley between the Fourth and Third Centuries BC.

The Chaonian and Epirote model of territorial organization in Classical and Hellenistic times has often been subject of valuable studies, mostly aimed at cataloguing and ranking the main centres of the territory in a hierarchical way. This approach evidently suffers from some general limitations in processing the information: the first issue concerns the absence of chronological data and of the economic, social, political context that allow one to comprehend the role of individual sites and their relations with others. Secondly, such studies rely almost exclusively on outdated research, consolidating and reproducing obvious errors, for example in the site plans. Therefore, based only on a limited and uncertain amount of archaeological data, they tend to privilege arbitrarily identified interpretative categories, such as those linked to a settlement's monumental characteristics. These are only partially connected to their functions, and more often to the variables of post-depositional processes, all at the expense of a holistic approach. Work carried out since 2005 in the Drino Valley has tried to minimize this uncertainty and heterogeneity of data by carrying out topographic research on sites considered useful for our understanding of territorial dynamics and by collecting the most updated, reliable, detailed and homogeneous archaeological data possible. Based on the outcomes of this research, the aim of this paper is that of identifying a model for reconstructing the settlement system of the Drino Valley, by addressing, in particular, the relationships between its various centres.