A multidisciplinary approach to the relationship between seasonal settlements and multiple uses: case studies from southern Europe (15th-21st centuries)

Building upon the increasing recent interest in the archaeology of seasonal occupation, this chapter will focus on settlements associated with short and long transhumance. These sites were mainly located on common land, with some still existing today. Using case studies from the Basque Country and Ligurian Apennines, this chapter will establish interconnections between transformations in the structural characteristics of buildings, practices of environmental resource management, and the social organisation of mountain spaces, together with ownership and access rights to commons. This interdisciplinary methodology – which combines landscape archaeology, historical ecology surveys, environmental archaeology analysis, and documentary research methods – allows for an analysis of transformations of management systems of environmental resources and their connection with changes to seasonal settlements. This approach also reflects on the progressive disappearance of multiple agro-forestry-pastoral activities and changes in the jurisdictional realm of the management of collective spaces within peasant societies. This provides opportunity to reflect on the great complexity of the multiple dimensions related to pastoral practices and on the necessity to retain this complexity in the deciphering and interpretation of archaeological evidence