The 10th-5th centuries BCE (the first centuries of the Iron Age) witnessed significant societal transformations across the Mediterranean. Populations grew in many regions, the first genuine economic integration of the basin occurred through maritime interaction and overseas settlement, and, for the first time, communities characterisable as urban and state-like are identifiable from the sea’s eastern littoral (where they had a deeper Bronze Age history) through to its Atlantic border. Archaeology is the discipline best equipped to address these developments, which in many regions precede, or are illuminated by few, historical sources. Yet there remain fundamental questions not only about the comparability of these interlinked changes, and the best ways to investigate them, in theoretical, methodological and evidential terms.

Recent archaeological research in the Mediterranean recognises the profound impacts of the region's highly variable, fragmented ecologies on its past and present societies. But this fragmentation raises fundamental questions about the comparability or distinctiveness of historical trajectories in different regions. Urbanisation in the 10th-5th centuries BCE is a case in point; this historically significant societal transformation is widespread, but its interregional variability, and the interaction between local and Mediterranean-wide causes and consequences remains contested.

The proposed project tackles these unresolved questions through a multi-scalar, comparative investigation of urbanisation in three regions: the Aegean, Etruria, and Sicily. The project addresses Mediterranean-wide phenomena through three distinct and complementary scales of analysis, and so seeks to clarify the nature, processes and comparability of urbanisation, and the associated development of independent polities and civic communities, in different regional contexts. Integrating analyses of, at the macro-scale, demographic and environmental dynamics, at the meso-scale, regional settlement systems, and at the micro-scale, individual site histories, this project will break new ground in contextualising local developments against wider trends, and offering insights on the nature, variability, causes and implications of urbanisation in the Iron Age Mediterranean.