Landscapes of Mediterranean Celts: palaeoecological and geoarchaeological perspectives of Iron Age transmediterranean contact and interaction (CELTMED).

In Western Europe, the onset of the Iron Age implied a series of critical cultural and technological changes that were to a large degree connected with the development of contact and exchange networks with the Mediterranean World.

New cultural influences, involving different traditions of land and resources management, spread especially from Greek colonies into the sphere of the rising Celtic civilization, where they merged with autochthonous dynamics and promoted changes in social structures, economic and productive systems and land use.

However, very few studies have openly addressed the environmental and landscape consequences of the Greek colonization in the Celtic world, and thus its impact and role in the shaping of Western European cultural landscapes remains largely overlooked.

To fill in this gap, CELTMED will employ an integrated multidisciplinary approach merging palaeoecology and geoarchaeology in three selected sites subject to different degrees of Greek influence: Abdera, an Aegean colony representing the genuine landscapes of the Greek World; Corent, a Gallic oppidum in central France exemplifying genuine Celtic landscapes; and Lattara, an hybrid Celtic site with a harbour under important Greek influence, located in the contact area of both civilizations in the coastal wetlands of SE France.

CELTMED will use high-resolution, multi-proxy palaeoecological and geoarchaeological analyses of sedimentary archives, combined with archaeological data, to reconstruct and compare socio-environmental dynamics and landscape change across this transmediterranean geographic and cultural transect from coastal Greek to Continental Celtic worlds.

This will allow to explore how the interplay between both cultures from the early Iron Age changed the way Celtic societies interacted with their environments and contributed to the shaping of cultural landscapes in the Celtic area, providing a new and more comprehensive knowledge of the history of Western European landscapes.