Reacting to the Powers that Be: Investigations of a Calabrian, Post-Medieval Community
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Reacting to the Powers that Be: Investigations of a Calabrian, Post-Medieval Community Paula Kay Lazrus
Published online: 20 December 2013 # The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract The town of Bova (Calabria, Italy) is a post-medieval montane community that remained inaccessible well into the twentieth century. Archival research, field survey, and spatial analyses provide a foundation for investigating the effects of social and political restructuring on the economic and social development of the community. Attitudes of laxness, disinterest, or ignorance have been attributed to inhabitants of this region. They can be interpreted as projected upon the citizens of Bova and others in southern Calabria by those in more urban centers to the north. Potentially, they reflect preferred survival strategies in the face of shifting imperial control. Keywords Calabria . Archaeology . Post-medieval . Landscape . Colonialism
Introduction The southern Calabrian municipality of Bova, in the foothills of the Aspromonte, is the location for an ongoing investigation into life in a small post-medieval montane community. This paper presents an initial attempt to achieve a deeper understanding of the socioeconomic lives of Bovans utilizing the territory in the more recent past, by integrating information from the Napoleonic cadaster—the Catasto Murattiano— drawn up in 1807–08 with other archival documents and data from archaeological field survey. Historical material from this area of Italy is often rejected as not being old or unique enough for in depth study. Disentangling the lives of people in Bova’s territory and their use of the land is further complicated by the lack of a stratigraphic chronology. This is the first study in this region of Italy to try integrating archaeological and archival data for this time period and it provides a window into the lives of people in post-medieval Calabria that has been of scant interest to researchers (Athanassopoulos 2004; Galt 1991; Robb 1997). This work focuses primarily on data from the period in which southern Calabria was briefly under Napoleonic (French) rule P. K. Lazrus (*) Institute of Core Studies, St. John’s University, Bent Hall 347, 8000 Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY 11439, USA e-mail: [email protected]
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2014) 18:65–99
between episodes of Bourbon (Spanish) control (1806–15). Survival strategies developed during its prolonged colonial period (starting with the Normans in 1000 CE) extend into the period of unification (1861 when Italy formally became a single political entity) and further to the present. Bova’s territory prior to the twentieth century was significantly larger than it is today. It covered 300 km2 versus the 76.40 km2 for the combined municipalities of Bova and Bova Marina today. It controlled a territory inhabited since the Neolithic (Foxhall 2006; Robb 1999). During the post-medieval period most inhabitants lived in the town of Bova itself (C. ASRC 1807). There were also citizens who li
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