Late Holocene Human Driven Dynamics and Landscape Evolution on the Central Mediterranean Coastal Areas: Geoarchaeological, Biological and Archaeological Perspectives (ERC nEU-Med Project)

The ERC Advanced project “nEU-Med: Origins of a new Economic Union (7th to 12th centuries): resources, landscapes and political strategies in a Mediterranean region.”, funded by the European Research Council (ID: 670792) and hosted by the Department of History and Cultural Heritage of the University of Siena (Italy), aims at making a paradigmatic shift in understanding the archaeology of resource management and commerce during the revival of the Medieval Mediterranean. The study area is a classic Mediterranean riverine corridor, and associated coastal plains, in the Maremma region of south-western Tuscany (central Italy), encompassing numerous characteristics representative of other areas in the central Mediterranean. In the Central Mediterranean basin, fluvial and alluvial dynamics played a central role for the evolution of the coastal plains located between the sea and higher ground, formed as the result of the Holocene eustatic sea-level rise and typically characterized by a variety of wetland surfaces (e.g., ponds, littoral marshes, and lagoons). The geomorphological dynamics influenced a wide range of settlement, land management, and resilience strategies, to cope with the hazardous habitats, including diseases like the presence of malaria. The Medieval period ultimately is an age of paramount importance for the development of the Italian settlement landscape and for a large part of European coastal areas overlooking the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas. Castles, walled towns, and hilltop villages, as well as traditional agroforestry land-use and food production, represent the legacy of this era in the present Mediterranean landscape. Therefore, the historical evolution of the coastal lands finds its determining factors in natural events responding to socio-cultural events.