Colonial Interaction and Resource Exploitation in the Sinis Peninsula

In 1921, travel writer D.H. Lawrence called the western Mediterranean island of Sardinia an unsubdued landscape “outside the circuit of civilization,” never fully colonized by Romans, Phoenicians, or Greeks. This view is representative of wider scholarly perceptions, which have generally considered the coastal colonies of ancient traders separately from the rural, inland landscapes inhabited by the indigenous populations. In order to break down this binary, Sinis Archaeological Project explores ancient colonial interaction, landscape use, and resource exploitation in the coastal and inland landscapes of west-central Sardinia. Dr. Gosner will provide a preliminary report of our first two seasons of landscape survey, held in 2018 and 2019. She discusses the methodology for our multi-scalar survey, discuss the preliminary results from our survey of an inland agricultural zone, and assess how survey can provide a clearer picture of Phoenician, Punic, and Roman strategies for colonization and trade on the island.