Dr Dario Monti
Dario Monti is an archaeologist specialising in the societies of pre-Roman Italy, with a particular focus on the central Apennines. He obtained his PhD at the Université catholique de Louvain in 2024 with a dissertation entitled The inner Sabina: settlement patterns and society of a territory in the middle of the Apennines in pre-Roman times (forthcoming as a monograph).
His doctoral research, centred on the inland region of Sabina in the central Apennines, explored how ancient mountain communities organised their settlement systems, economies, and social structures in relation to both environmental constraints and cultural choices. Moving beyond traditional narratives that frame upland regions as marginal or underdeveloped, it approached these communities as dynamic and adaptive, shaped through ongoing socio-ecological interactions and historically specific trajectories.
More broadly, his work investigates the interplay between environmental conditions and cultural practices in the structuring of ancient societies, with a particular interest in social dynamics, settlement organisation, patterns of mobility and connectivity, and the economic use of landscapes. His research adopts a comparative and multi-scalar perspective, combining fieldwork, spatial analysis, and the integration of archaeological and environmental data in order to develop historically grounded interpretations of human–environment relationships.
About Dr Dario Monti’s Fellowship at KNIR
During his fellowship at the KNIR, Dario will further develop a comparative research framework on settlement systems in the central Apennines, with particular attention to upland environments. By placing different sectors of the mountain chain into dialogue, the project aims to identify recurring patterns, regional divergences, and historically specific trajectories in the organisation of these landscapes.
The project investigates how environmental conditions and cultural practices interacted in shaping patterns of habitation, economic organisation, and territorial structures. Rather than treating these factors as separate or opposed, it approaches them as elements of a single process through which social forms were continuously produced and transformed. Within this framework, particular emphasis is placed on hilltop sites, examined as components of wider settlement networks and reassessed beyond traditional interpretations that view them primarily as defensive or isolated features.
A central aim of the fellowship is methodological. Building on both his own experience and the KNIR’s long-standing tradition in landscape archaeology, the project seeks to refine approaches to the investigation of mountain contexts through the integration of systematic field survey, high-resolution topographic analysis, non-invasive techniques, and GIS-based modelling of movement, accessibility, and connectivity. Particular attention is devoted to the articulation between micro-scale evidence and broader territorial patterns, in order to develop more robust and scalable interpretative models.
More broadly, the project contributes to current debates on the relationship between environment and society in the ancient world by proposing an interpretative framework in which ecological constraints and social dynamics are understood as part of a single, historically contingent process shaping settlement organisation, economic strategies, and landscape use.