Joé JUNCKER¹, Ferréol SALOMON¹, Andrea GAUCCI², Paolo MOZZI³, Grégory MAINET⁴, Thomas MORARD⁴, Marcello TURCI⁵ & Laurent SCHMITT¹ présentent une conférence intitulée « Contrasting Rates and Synchronous Patterns. Progradation and Erosion in the Po and Tiber Deltas from the Beginning to the End of the Roman Period » à la Session n°6 « Coastal landscapes through the ages » du colloque international Landscape Archaeology Conference (LAC) qui se déroulera à la Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg (Allemagne) du 18 au 20 mars 2026.

Une équipe internationale et pluridisciplinaire

¹ Laboratoire Image Ville Environnement (UMR 7362), Université de Strasbourg, CNRS, ENGEES, France.
² Department of History and Cultures, Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Italy
³ Dipartimento di Geoscienze, University of Padova, Italy.
⁴ Département des Sciences historiques, Unité de Recherche "Art, Archéologie et Patrimoine", Université de Liège, Belgique.
⁵ Ministero della Cultura, Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio, Bari, Italy.

Plus d'informations

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Abstract

River deltas are exceptional geomorphological archives recording socio-environmental dynamics over the past 7000 years. Around the Mediterranean basin, human influence on deltaic sedimentation has intensified since the Bronze Age, reaching a turning point during the 1st millennium BCE. As the birthplace of Etruscan and Roman civilisations, Italy experienced significant population growth, technological advancement, and urbanisation, generating considerable environmental pressure. The Po and Tiber deltas, as the outlets of Italy's two largest river systems, provide contrasting yet complementary records of human-environment interactions during this chronological window. Their distinct sedimentary sequences and archaeological contexts make them ideal for comparative analysis. To reconstruct the multi-centennial trajectories of these deltaic landscapes, we create for both a Chrono-Spatial Model (CSM) that integrates geomorphological, archaeological, and historical data within a Bayesian statistical framework. This approach accurately quantifies deltaic progradation rates and identifies erosional gaps, providing essential data on coastal settlement patterns in response to shoreline mobility. The results reveal notably different progradation rates between the two deltas, but both systems display striking synchronicity in two key phases: accelerated progradation towards the 1st century BCE and widespread lobe erosion at the beginning of the Middle Ages. These parallel deltaic responses shed new light on how climatic variability and anthropogenic pressures interacted to shape fluvio-coastal landscapes over time.