Power in elevation: spatial hierarchies and heterarchy in central Italy’s mountain landscapes

The concept of topographic dominance offers an alternative perspective for interpreting power relations within the landscape. Dominance doesn‘t derive from what is seen, but from how a site occupies and defines the space around it, asserting a condition of — physical and symbolic — control over the territory. Applied to the framework of settlement transformations between the Early Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in Central Italy, this approach allows hierarchy to be read not as a rigid structure, but as the result of dynamic relationships between communities. During the Late Bronze Age (1350-950 BCE), the progressive shift of settlements toward mountainous areas reflects the search for new forms of territorial control and the redefinition of power relations in space. The use of the Composite Dominance Index (CDI) makes it possible to quantify this spatial condition and to highlight how the emergence of new settlement poles reflects a redefinition of community identities. Through the combination of spatial analyses, the use of remote sensing to identify fortifications, predictive modelling, and theoretical reflections on heterarchy, the paper proposes an interpretation of the protohistoric landscape as a multi-level system in which forms of power are expressed in space rather than in structures.