ARCHAIC SETTLEMENT AND EARLY ROMAN COLONISATION OF THE LEPINE FOOTHILLS M. van Leusen, University of Groningen INTRODUCTION In April 1998 a small team from the University of Groningen conducted a field walking survey of part of the Lepine foothills, located in south Lazio (an hour's drive south of Rome). Part of the larger Regional Pathways to Complexity (RPC) project conducted jointly with the Free University of Amsterdam, this and future field work aims to answer current research questions relating to urbanisation and colonisation in protohistoric Italy, and to provide a yardstick against which to measure earlier work. The part of south Lazio known as the Pontine Region is one of three regions studied in the RPC project. Attema most recently studied the protohistoric and early Roman settlement of the Pontine Region (Attema 1993, 1996, in prep.). The current view is that nucleated settlement seems to have originated in the Iron Age around the Alban Lake (with such nuclei as Ardea, Lanuvium, and Velletri) and to have developed slightly later on the higher ground around the Pontine plain proper (at such sites as Satricum, Cisterna di Latina, and Caracupa/Valvisciolo). However, many of the Archaic nucleated settlements in the latter area disappeared sometime during the later sixth century BC (the late Archaic Period), and seemed to be replaced after 500 BC (the post-Archaic) by small dispersed settlement only found in the volcanic tuff hills (Attema 1993: 122).