Chapter three theorizes unruly landscapes through the relations of polities, peoples, and shifting ecologies. It emphasizes the myriad ways in which human-environment relationships are forged relative to a given social and political order. Threaded within a critique of existing conceptions of the political geography of Iron Age Cyprus are arguments for taking seriously the dynamic resources, places and community boundaries, and temporalities of urban and rural terrains. The chapter utilizes claims drawn from rural studies, anthropology and political ecology, and history to investigate settlement hierarchies and resource control, territoriality, and social time.

This chapter provides a review of archaeologies of landscape and outlines where environmental studies reside within these discussions, particularly in the recent rise of climatic and environmental histories of the ancient Mediterranean. Through a review of the challenges of environmental determinism and the interpretive problems of studies of the historical forcing of climatic events in human history, Kearns argues for integrated methodologies that look critically at varied scales of evidence and interpretation. In advocating the study of weathered materials and their instrumentality within ancient landscape studies, the chapter engages with recent archaeological scholarship on materialism that analyzes how things act and effect historical change. Kearns contends that differentiated entanglements of communities and their physical, changing surroundings contributed to transformations in social and political evaluations of land, place, and status.

Chapter 9 focuses on the erasure of the Ghetto in the late nineteenth century as urban renewal, and in particular flood control, left the district divided in two – one modern and tied to the new road system and one within the lines of the ancient circus porticos.

Chapter 5 covers the next five hundred years of development when medieval residences and pathways filled the interstices of imperial ruins and the neighborhood’s first church, Sant’Angelo, now anchored the space.

Chapter 8 delves into the creation of Rome’s Ghetto in the heart of the once center of the Circus Flaminius and the division of the Sant’Angelo rione into essentially two districts from the mid-sixteenth century until the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 10 takes the story from the 1920s to the present as the two sections became three with the creation of an archaeological park out of a medieval neighborhood and tells how the long history of the area is found in building lines and pavement markers.

Chapter 3 focuses on the total makeover of the Circus Flaminius by the Emperor Augustus and its impact on the uses of and movement through the space.

Chapter 1 considers the earliest development in a meadow at two crossroads in the fifth century bce to the construction of the Circus Flaminius three centuries later.

Chapter 4 takes the story from the death of Augustus to the Gothic War a half millennium later when the circus plaza shrank as new structures were added to accommodate changing uses.

Chapter 6 explains the growth of the now Sant’Angelo district as a mixed use residential/commercial space from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries as Rome’s scattered population migrated to the Tiber’s bend and how the ancient space was remembered.

Chapter 2 analyzes the attraction of the circus to republican generals as a site for construction of temples and porticos over the following two centuries.

To the west of the Theater of Marcellus, efforts to erase a neighborhood were only partially successful. Buildings were removed but not the cultural identity of the space nor the subtle but discernible topographical imprint of its prior life. The Jewish community that first arrived from Trastevere a millennium ago simply moved aside when the circus plaza was swept clean and then slipped back to reclaim its long-held space.

Chapter 7 considers the area’s continued growth and then slow decline from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries as commerce drawn along the routes of ancient porticos shifted away and the location of the ancient circus was forgotten.