**Preface**

The scope of this volume is to provide new data on aspects of landscape archaeology and show how and why methods, paradigms, and perspectives have changed during the last fifty years regarding conceiving, approaching, and studying the archaeology of the human past. The methods we employ now to interpret archaeological landscapes and the effect of human impact and climatic variations on various territories are just some that have greatly improved from the end of the Seventies onward; this is due to different reasons. Among them are ethnoarchaeological and archaeometric approaches, the systematic and accurate use of radiocarbon dating of different types of organic material, and the help of many scientific disciplines that have been developed to interpret the most hidden aspects of the way humans exploited plains, mountains, river banks and coastal strips. These events led to dramatic, sometimes irreversible changes. They took place through the ages, mainly due to subsistence economic reasons and the exploitation of raw material sources, including rocks, metal ores, and clays for pottery production.

The present volume consists of fifteen papers. They show a great variety of approaches used by archaeologists and other scholars from several parts of the world to improve some aspects of landscape archaeology and to interpret the processes that took place in different prehistoric and historical periods, transforming the territory and leading to the present situation.

The guest editors are deeply indebted to all the authors who were kind enough to provide papers for publishing a new volume of the Landscape series and to present new and original data from their research, many of which are currently underway.

> **Paolo Biagi and Elisabetta Starnini** *Editors*
