Archaeologists have not confined their interests to the great consular roads. Minor highways in areas away from the main stream of traffic are often more rewarding, since they tend to be better preserved, and offer some chance to trace the pre-Roman systems that underlie or intersect them. The district just north of Rome has been surveyed in this way by members of the British School at Rome since 1954, only just in time, for there prevails in this region a situation analogous to the rapid disappearance of Indian remains in the American West with the building of the great hydroelectric dams. In the country north of Rome, since World War II, there has been an extensive program of land expropriation, reclamation, and resettlement of small farmers, an excellent thing for rehabilitating the Italian peasantry, but fatal for archaeological remains, since the plan involves the use of the deep plow, an ideal instrument for obliterating traces of ancient roadways. Thus it is that members and friends of the British School, spurred on by the Director, John Ward Perkins, a worthy successor of the indefatigable Thomas Ashby, are to be seen braving wind and weather as they scour the countryside for Roman and pre-Roman roads from Veii to beyond Cività Castellana, armed with large-scale maps, air photographs, and brown paper bags for collecting the potsherds which are the evidence of ancient roadside habitation. The British School’s most significant recent work has been carried on from Nepi, a Roman colony allegedly of 383 B.C., twenty-eight miles north-northwest of Rome, and Falerii Novi, about four miles farther north. Falerii Novi was built by the Romans from the ground up in 241 B.C. to house the inhabitants of Falerii Veteres (Cività Castellana) a hostile native Faliscan center, which the Romans completely destroyed. But the old city must have been resettled, for ruts in the third century B.C. road connecting the new city with the old are not of standard Roman width, and were probably made by Faliscan wagons. The _cardo_ of the new settlement is formed by a new road connection with the south, the Via Amerina (Fig. 12.2); in the course of exploring this the British archaeologists found traces from which the older road system (Fig. 12.3) which it partially supplanted, may be inferred. At Torre dell’ Isola, just north of Nepi, for example, they found, by the wall of a medieval castle, sherds with the cord-impressed chevrons characteristic of Villanovan ware, and part of one of the portable hearths which we met first in the primitive hut on the Palatine in Rome. These sherds provide evidence for habitation here at least as early as on the Palatine. The discovery of similar sherds within the walls of Etruscan Veii suggests a people inferior culturally to the Etruscans, and probably living in subjection to them. [Illustration: FIG. 12.2 Roman roads of the _ager Faliscus_. (_Papers Brit. Sch. at Rome_ 12 [1957], p. 68)]