Roca Archaeological Survey

The geographical context for the research work of the project “Lanscape of Mobility and Memory” is today’s Roca/S. Foca, venued by the modern Municipium of Melendugno (LE). The area has proven to be a key site woven by interactional and long-lasting mobility threads from a period that certainly goes from II millennium B.C., when the settlement was the biggest harbor in relation to the traffics between the Egean-Micenean world and the central Mediterranean sea, till the early 2000, when S. Foca/Melendugno was the heart of the first migration flows originated after the cold war, and thought the Greek and Roman times (the mobility, dynamics and interactions of whom are well known in Puglia), thus through Medieval times and Post-Medieval world, when all of the eastern part of Salento was concerned by the arrival and settlement of Griko speakers, a community with strong religious, cultural and economic bonds with the trans-Adriatic world.