A Multidisciplinary project for the study of historical landscapes:new archaeological and physicochemical data from the‘Colline Metallifere’ district.

In this paper we will present some results obtained by a combined multidisciplinary approach to the study of a territory located in the southern part of Tuscany, the ‘Colline Metallifere’ district. The area has been studied from different points of view, and there are many written contributions concerning the evolution of its human landscape over the centuries. In this paper we are focusing particularly on the use of chemical analyses on crucial historical areas. The considerable amount of information retrieved and the unquestionable value of the data obtained by portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analyses are now opening new fields to the use of the portable instrument. The new opportunities offered by the ‘NeuMed’ ERC project, based in the University of Siena, will allow the testing of the reliability of this technique on a wider scale, in multidisciplinary research that aims to reconstruct the historical landscapes of the area.