• January 8, 2026 | 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
• Francescan A, Ballroom Level

3B: Landscapes in Transition: New Approaches to Medieval and Post-Medieval Fieldwork (Colloquium)

Sponsored by:
MAPMA

Organizers:
Fotini Kondyli, University of Virginia, and Angelo Castrorao Barba, Escuela de Estudios Árabes (EEA), Granada, Spain

Overview Statement:
This colloquium brings together recent archaeological fieldwork projects investigating medieval and postmedieval periods across the Mediterranean and its surrounding regions. The session highlights the diversity of approaches and methodologies employed in contemporary archaeology, including excavation, survey, laboratory analysis, postexcavation research, and archival study, while emphasizing the vital role of fieldwork in understanding and preserving the region’s cultural heritage.

The papers presented share a focus on the dynamic interaction between human communities and the landscapes they inhabited, shaped, and transformed over time. Political centers, sacred spaces, fortifications, burial grounds, and monastic sites are explored not only as reflections of social and religious organization but also in relation to their environmental settings and natural features. Mountains, coastlines, waterways, and resource-rich zones emerge not as passive backdrops but as active agents in structuring settlement patterns, power relations, and economic activity.

A unifying aspect of the session is the innovative use of new technologies—including LiDAR, photogrammetry, digital documentation, and environmental analysis—which are enhancing field documentation, enabling refined reconstructions of past landscapes, and informing strategies for site preservation. These methodological advances facilitate new insights into patterns of settlement, landscape modification, and heritage management in the face of both historical and contemporary environmental challenges.

Chronologically and geographically wide-ranging, the session offers comparative perspectives on the medieval and postmedieval Mediterranean, encompassing diverse communities—Islamic, Christian, and multiconfessional—and regions from the western Mediterranean to the Byzantine East. This broad coverage allows for critical reflection on long-term processes of landscape transformation, patterns of continuity and change, and the networks of interaction that connected different parts of the Mediterranean world.

In an era of growing concern for cultural heritage preservation, this colloquium highlights how current archaeological fieldwork is generating new data, refining methodologies, and advancing our understanding of medieval and postmedieval societies. The session fosters dialogue on innovative and interdisciplinary approaches that are reshaping the study of the past while addressing the challenges of heritage conservation and interpretation in the Mediterranean and beyond.