ABSTRACT
Landscape archaeology avails itself of methods and approaches from the fields of natural and social sciences, which it applies to urban or rural contexts, providing an outstanding potential source of fresh diachronical information concerning human settlement and productive activities in their geographic context. The main problems hampering landscape archaeology from realizing its potential and from making significant contribution to debates on long-term demographic trends in Mediterranean Europe arise from the diversity in approaches and methods that make meaningful comparisons of regional data difficult. The 'interdisciplinary' approach has been regarded as a desideratum of every project concerned with the understanding of past landscapes. Indeed, the POPULUS Project, concerned with both landscape change and demography, has highlighted how good landscape archaeology needs 'natural scientists to analyze the changing forms of the landscape' as well as 'archaeologists to analyze the changing settlement morphologies and systems'.
