Dalla gestione delle risorse naturali alla razionalizzazione di un assetto territoriale preesistente. Il caso della Sardegna romana.

In Sardinia, various attempts to analyze and reconstruct the settlement principles of the Roman era have often faced the objective difficulty of recognizing the most common and known traces attributable to land management practices. It is certain that after the conquest of the island, its productive contexts were declared “public land of the Roman People”. Understanding the means through which this characteristic was structured is more challenging. The few findings of boundary stones do not resolve the issue, and the ambiguity generated by sources, the low population density, and a presence that seems to concentrate predominantly on the coastal front, add to the difficulties in recognizing traces of centuriation. In general, overall conditions seem to emerge that suggest an impression of a mixed organization: on the one hand, anchored to the main river and marsh systems of the island; on the other, through a process of territorial delimitation that might have been achieved through a selective reuse of already existing places and structures which, in some cases, seem capable of spanning particularly long phases of occupation