Caves and rock shelters across the Mediterranean constitute exceptional cultural archives, preserving long-term records of human activity that extend from prehistory to the contemporary period. Despite their significance, research has often been fragmented by period-based traditions and disciplinary boundaries, with prehistoric human–cave interaction frequently studied in isolation from later historical, religious and socio-economic engagements with subterranean spaces. As a result, the narratives that caves reveal about the societies intertwined with them remain necessarily incomplete and open-ended. These “unfinished tales” have limited our ability to understand caves as dynamic settings of human–environment interaction across the longue durée.
This paper argues for the necessity of a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach to Mediterranean cave archaeology that integrates archaeological, geoarchaeological, palaeoenvironmental, biological and historical perspectives alongside technological advances. By moving beyond narrowly defined chronological or functional interpretations, caves can be examined as evolving socio-cultural spaces shaped by changing practices of habitation, spiritual expression, refuge, production and mobility. Such an approach allows short-term and episodic engagements to be contextualised within broader regional and temporal trajectories of human activity.
Focusing on case studies from Greece and the Adriatic, this paper highlights the importance of diachronicity, methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration in the study of Mediterranean caves and their continuously evolving relationships with human societies. Ultimately, it calls for a renewed theoretical and methodological agenda in cave archaeology, positioning caves as active cultural landscapes whose meanings are both continually renegotiated within particular contexts, yet are also shaped by longer-term, diachronic traditions of cave use across the Mediterranean.

First Author: Fotis Georgiadis

Co-Authors: Konstantinos Trimmis, Stella Katsarou

Keywords:
Cave archaeology
Interdisciplinarity
Longue Durée
Methodologies
Cultural Landscapes