Archaeology of Commons: a Multidisciplinary Approach to the Reconstruction of Multiple Uses and Conflicts on European Uplands

The paper presents a multidisciplinary research project (“Archaeology of Commons: cultural Heritage and Material Evidence of a Disappearing Europe”) on the archaeology of common-lands. The main goal of the project is to investigate, by means of historical and archaeological analysis, the intimate social dimension at the base of the common lands management in the context of southern European mountainous regions. Research investigates the dynamic nature of commons starting from the reconstruction of the present organisation of common lands, going back to the complex transformations of common properties in the nineteenth century and analysing the problem of the archaeological visibility of conflicts since the ancien régime. The project will examine how archaeological methods could clarify different aspects of the history of the collective access rights to land, by applying in selected mountain areas methodological approaches based on historical ecology, rural and agrarian archaeology.