Abstract:

The Republican period is an era of intense changes in the settlement of the Ager of Tarraco. It is a phase of maximum dispersion of farm settlements and, during the first century BC, it is also the time of the appearance of the first Roman villas. Within the Ager Tarraconensis, we tried to establish the typography of rural sites: for the Republican period, those sites were classified as farms of indigenous tradition, farms of Roman traditions, rural towns, pottery workshops and villae. The Republican period appears to be an intense period of acculturation with a wide dispersal of rural sites across the territory. Society is changing and the indigenous tradition of small establishments is gradually sidelined by the new Roman productive system. The building of the first villae is associated with the construction of the first urban structure of Tarraco and the first centuriated cadastre at the turn of the first century BC.