Rural landscapes along the Vardar Valley

This paper has a twin methodological and interpretative focus. It presents the use of geospatial technologies applied to archaeological surveying. We use the high-resolution spatial and temporal data obtained from the study of the ancient Protohistoric and Roman landscape in the eastern area of the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Alicante province, Spain) to illustrate the methodological proposals. The observed spatial patterns allow us to infer certain aspects relating to the ancient use of the land, transformations in settlement patterns and the intensification of landscape use. 1. Rural landscape and surface record Studies of the ancient rural landscape face major challenges in identifying and explaining the archaeological vestiges. Most of the difficulties encountered during this type of research have been described in works devoted to that subject and it is beyond the possibilities of this paper to comment on and explain them (Alcock and Cherry, 2004; Mayoral and Sevillano, 2013). Nevertheless, along those initial lines we would like to refer to certain factors that, from our point of view, affect the question of the surface record. The first variables we find are natural and include soil conditions and topographic, climatic and edaphic particularities, as well as the vegetation, all of which condition the way in which the surface is seen. The impacts on surveys range from the soil visibility conditions caused by vegetation to the effect on slope topography of landslips that lead to greater surface dispersion. Another set of factors that conditions surveys is human secular establishment in rural environments and on farmland. Repeated occupation of the same niches blurs or erases earlier traces, making them difficult to identify and analyse. This particularly affects Mediterranean highland areas where terraces and banks have been built to parcel out farmland, mainly during the mediaeval and modern periods. Finally, we refer to ancient establishment methods, the intensity of land use and the properties of the surface archaeological record formed over the centuries. These formation conditions affect such aspects as the survival of building remains, movable find density and the way in which wider or narrower dispersions were formed. These factors sometimes lead to areas with a high density of surface archaeological record. These are places with high levels of dispersed remains consisting of thousands of fragments that often form virtual carpets of pottery remains covering hundreds of hectares. Sometimes they result from the superposition of pottery remains from different periods as a result of a dense historical stratification of rural sites. On occasions those extensive zones of finds are dated to a single period, which presents us with post-depositional processes and farming practices that have led to the formation of such complex spatial distributions of remains. These circumstances make it necessary to use archaeological surface investigation methodologies with multiple techniques with the aim of increasing the spatial and chronological resolution of the data obtained. Only by refining the procedures will we be able to progress in our understanding of the ancient rural landscape. In the following article we present the methodological proposals for surveying, analysing and interpreting these zones with a high density of surface remains. Based on specific cases from the Protohistoric and Roman periods in our study area we illustrate the methods and proposals for the archaeological interpretation of the evidence. The study area is the River Serpis valley, a mountainous region in the north of the present-day province of Alicante (Spain). In antiquity it was a territory presided over by fortified centres of a certain size from which a dense dispersed rural occupation was organised. These rural communities d basically farms and small villages d are fundamental to our understanding of the ways in

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Macedoniae Acta Archaeologica 20, 2011

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Interdisciplinaria Archaeologica, 2018

This paper is focused on the Neolithic tell-site of Vrbjanska Čuka in Pelagonia, Republic of Macedonia, where the authors have been performing archaeobotanical research since 2016. Results of the analyses of botanical macroremains and microremains (starch, phytoliths) and faunal microremains collected in season 2016 are presented in the broader context of the Neolithic in the Balkans in order to estimate the bioarchaeological potential of this site. The first and final parts of the paper outline the bioarchaeological studies connected with Neolithic settlements in the southern regions of the Balkans. A substantial proliferation of environmental studies has been recorded in the last decade concerning the archaeobotanical and archaeozoological evidence. Here, most attention is paid to archaeobotanical studies which consider Neolithic settlements and their bioarchaeological context.

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2015

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