Shaping the margins in Southern Latium. Sant'Andrea di Campello and the making of a medieval mediterranean landscape

The medieval site of Sant’Andrea di Campello (Monti Aurunci, southern Latium), investigated since 2022 within the Monti Aurunci Project, offers a privileged perspective on settlement and landscape dynamics along the Tyrrhenian frontier between the Early and Late Middle Ages. Strategically located near the San Nicola pass, between the Liri Valley and the coast of Gaeta, the site preserves a long sequence of occupation, abandonment, and reuse phases reflecting the region’s political, economic, and ecological transformations. Excavations revealed a fortified enclosure, defensive structures, and, on the plateau on the summit, a small apsidal church with an associated cemetery — a focal point of aggregation and Christianisation for surrounding rural communities. The burials, dated between the 13th and 15th centuries, display collective and reused funerary practices, confirming the church’s role as a symbolic and territorial nucleus. Later phases record evidence of silvo-pastoral exploitation and ephemeral huts, attesting to the continued use of the mountain landscape into the modern period. Sant’Andrea thus emerges as a laboratory for understanding the interplay between landscape, power, and community, where Byzantine legacies, processes of incastellamento, and marginal economies converged in the making of a changing territory. Far from being a passive periphery, the Tyrrhenian mountains appear as active zones of mediation, resilience, and innovation that contributed to the political and environmental construction of the medieval Mediterranean world.