This dissertation analyzes the settlement landscape of Sicily in its seven centuries under Roman hegemony, with the aim of understanding the effects of large- and small-scale economic and political changes on patterns of urban settlement across the island and within its regions. Sicily's long history of urbanization and its early and enduring incorporation into the Roman Empire make it a valuable case study for examining the relationship between imperialism and urban development, allowing a "long view" of the impact of imperial power on local, regional, and supra-regional economic, political, and social structures. I begin with an overview of the historiography of Roman Sicily, followed by a summary and justification of my own methodology. I argue against the once dominant strand of scholarship that framed Sicily's history under Rome as one of decline and obsolescence. Instead, based on the recent proliferation of archaeological research in Sicily, my approach to the island's urban history in the longue durée rejects the dichotomy between urban and rural settlement. In its place I adopt a flexible definition of settlement that takes into account the wide range of roles that cities could exercise for their inhabitants, and the potential for these roles (and their manifestations in urban space) to change over time. I follow this introductory section with the empirical core of the dissertation: a quantitative overview of the development of Sicily's urban landscape across its seven centuries as part of the Roman Empire, based on a database containing archaeological and historical data on urban settlements occupied within this period. I identify two main transformative periods. First, the establishment of Roman hegemony after the First Punic War led to the sharp decline in the number of secondary urban centers (mostly hilltop settlements fulfilling a primarily defensive function) in the western interior. Second, the shift of commercial currents towards Rome after the sack of Carthage in 146 BC brought about a contraction in urban settlement on the southern coast that climaxed in the mid- and late first century BC (and was institutionalized in Augustus' new urban hierarchy), and that later affected urban settlement in the interior. Outside these periods, however, the urban system as a whole was relatively stable. This overview of urbanization across the island is followed by an examination of the history and material culture of several archaeologically and historically well attested urban settlements, focusing on their individual development in the first two centuries AD. In these case studies, I argue for the "transformation" rather than the "decline" of urban life in Sicily. Many older cities, especially along the southern coast and in the interior, gradually lost their roles as centers of political authority and of elite residence and investment, though some remained centers of economic activity, sometimes following movement to more economically integrated sites. Political activity was instead concentrated in a few large coastal cities that had been made colonies by Augustus or that later gained colonial status. These cities were centers of diverse populations and a wide range of economic activities, and they maintained strong connections with other regions of the Mediterranean. In the final chapter, I examine the new forms of settlement that arose in the imperial period, whose emergence and development, as I suggest, reflected the evolving political and economic position of Sicily within the Roman Empire as a whole. These semi-urban centers tended to be located close to maritime and land transportation routes and they show evidence of intense economic activity, but few signs of political autonomy. Some lay in the hinterland of primary urban centers and served as economic satellites; others served as population and service centers in areas otherwise devoid of urban settlement. A key finding of the dissertation - and one that is not necessarily paralleled in other parts of the Roman Empire - is that within Sicilian cities, economic activity and political authority were only loosely related variables. Though only a small number of urban centers were loci of political authority, economic activity was diffuse: towns that lost their political roles could remain centers of economic activity, while new settlements were largely geared towards the processing and distribution of agricultural products. I conclude, therefore, by suggesting ways in which Sicily's urban history can be understood more broadly, in the context of the urbanization of the Roman Mediterranean, and especially in comparison to North Africa and southern Italy, regions with strong historical ties to Sicily, but with different histories of political, economic, social, and cultural relations with Rome.

Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island’s central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome’s first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily’s crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture. Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson’s Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island’s political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome’s evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.

The island of Sicily was a highly contested area throughout much of its history. Among the first to exert strong influence on its political, cultural, infrastructural, and demographic developments were the two major decentralized civilizations of the first millennium BCE: the Phoenicians and the Greeks. While trade and cultural exchange preceded their permanent presence, it was the colonizing movement that brought territorial competition and political power struggles on the island to a new level. The history of six centuries of colonization is replete with accounts of conflict and warfare that include cross-cultural confrontations, as well as interstate hostilities, domestic conflicts, and government violence. This book is not concerned with realities from the battlefield or questions of military strategy and tactics, but rather offers a broad collection of archaeological case studies and historical essays that analyze how political competition, strategic considerations, and violent encounters substantially affected rural and urban environments, the island’s heterogeneous communities, and their social practices. These contributions, originating from a workshop in 2018, combine expertise from the fields of archaeology, ancient history, and philology. The focus on a specific time period and the limited geographic area of Greek Sicily allows for the thorough investigation and discussion of various forms of organized societal violence and their consequences on the developments in society and landscape.

Eleven original chapters on recent archaeological work in Southern Italy and Sicily by 14 Italian authors, all translated into English.

Tabernae were ubiquitous in all Roman cities, lining the busiest streets and dominating their most crowded intersections in numbers far exceeding those of any other form of building. That they played a vital role in the operation of the city, and indeed in the very definition of urbanization in ancient Rome, is a point too often under-appreciated in Roman studies, and one which bears fruitful further exploration. The Roman Retail Revolution offers a thorough investigation into the social and economic worlds of the Roman shop, focusing on food and drink outlets in particular. Combining critical analysis of both archaeological material and textual sources, it challenges many of the conventional ideas about the place of retailing in the Roman city and unravels the historical development of tabernae to identify three major waves or revolutions in the shaping of retail landscapes. The volume is underpinned by two new and important bodies of evidence: the first generated from the University of Cincinnati's recent archaeological excavations into a Pompeian neighborhood of close to twenty shop-fronts, and the second resulting from a field-survey of the retail landscapes of more than a hundred cities from across the Roman world. The richness of this information, combined with the volume's interdisciplinary approach to the lives of the Roman sub-elite, results in a refreshingly original look at the history of retailing and urbanism in the Roman world.

This study presents a new regional history of the middle Tiber valley as a lens through which to view the emergence and transformation of the city of Rome from 1000 BC to AD 1000. Setting the ancient city within the context of its immediate territory, the authors reveal the diverse and enduring links between the metropolis and its hinterland.