Soils and Soil Landscapes of the Raganello River Catchment (Calabria, Italy)

Book excerpt: Understanding how past and current physical landscape processes, both natural and anthropogenic, affect the archaeological record has become one of the main aims of the burgeoning field of Geoarchaeology. But the ideal of effective multidisciplinary research collaboration is hard to achieve. This second volume of the 'Raganello Basin Studies' series demonstrates how intensive collaboration between earth scientists and archaeologists has resulted in a systematic approach to the description and assessment of archaeologically relevant soils and landscape processes in a typical Mediterranean landscape - the basin of the Raganello River in southern Italy. It is both a detailed report on the extensive field studies conducted by the authors in 2012-2014, and a much needed ?how to' guide to the study of landscapes and soils within the framework of landscape archaeological projects in the Mediterranean. The work described here builds on the expertise in Mediterranean soils and landscapes gained by the first author over decades of research, and avoids or explains jargon that would otherwise deter those with a purely humanities background