Paesaggio naturale ed antropico nell’area costiera della Toscana meridionale (Val di Cornia): sistemi di fonti, strumenti e metodi di studio per una nuova lettura storico-archeologica dell’ambiente e delle sue trasformazioni

The coastal area of the Val di Cornia (southern Tuscany, Italy) has been for many years the focus of historical-archaeological studies that have reconstructed its settlement patterns through the centuries. Thanks to a strongly multidisciplinary research approach, supported by the ERC project nEU-Med (https://www.neu-med.unisi.it), new investigations enabled to connect the historical settlement patterns with a more defined environmental context, characterised by a great variety of ecosystems and a considerable wealth of available assets, above all fish farming and salt production. The presence of vast lagoons and a highly widespread river system certainly constituted an attractive element for human settlement. To reconstruct the diachronic evolution of the context, the research project developed new operative protocols and promoted the use of integrated survey methodologies, combining archaeology, geology, geochemistry, archaeobotany, and geophysics, together with the archaeological excavation of a medieval salt work. Remote sensing instruments were also widely used (high resolution LiDAR and photogrammetry), as well as geoarchaeological analyses. Through the combination of different source, “multi-scalar” approach, archaeological excavations and historical-documentary analyses, the research has collected a considerable amount of new data that contributed to unfold the evolution of the coastal plain landscape, defining the extent of the wetlands, the main features of the forest landscape, for a better understanding of settlement dynamics and economic productions.