The proposed session aims to face the topic of the relationship between forms of human mobility and the shape and functional vocation of living spaces.

Over the last thirty years, the theme of mobility has been widely addressed from the point of view of the effects on the social and political structures of communities involved in this kind of phenomena and from that of the forms of hybridization connected to material culture and artisanal production. An equally relevant issue, which is finding growing attention in the scientific debate, concerns the outcomes that these dynamics have produced on anthropic spaces, on their form and organization and on the modes of their use.

Forms of mobility of different kind (accidental or organized, stable or temporary, over short or long distances) and entities (involving more or less large and stratified groups or single persons) may have determined processes of change on living spaces and on the ways of perceiving them. These changes can be read at different scales of investigation:

- at a regional or sub-regional level: in the hierarchy between the sites in a territory and in the patterns of their distribution;

- on a settlement scale: on the general configuration and topographical organization of the spaces of each site;

- on particular sectors and contexts of the inhabited space aimed at specific functions and practices: architecture and productive areas, collective and sacral spaces, residential and funerary contexts;

- finally, a further issue is represented by the relationship between the cases of mobility recorded in ancient literary sources for specific places and chronological periods and the processes that can be defined for the same contexts through the analysis of material data.

The main objective of the session is to investigate the outcomes, at times disruptive and at times subtle, that mobility dynamics exerted on the ways of organizing, using and perceiving the space by the community or parts of it and to contribute to the development of a line of research that, thanks to new data and methodological approaches, envisages extremely interesting future developments.

With these purposes, the session will consider different geographical and socio-cultural contexts of ancient Italy. The papers of the panel will offer a diachronic and multiscale perspective of investigation, including cases concerning wide-ranging mobility dynamics with impacts on regional and supra-regional districts up to phenomena linked to specific urban contexts and to functional areas of the ancient city.

On the methodological level, approaches aimed at investigating the interacting dynamics involved in the formation, fruition, and perception of living spaces will be particularly emphasized through the implementation of analytical procedures and up-to-date technologies. In particular, the results of new investigations conducted by applying spatial analysis models, social anthropology studies and chemical and mineralogical-petrographic analyses aimed at identifying specific dynamics of interaction between people, ideas and craft skills will be presented.