Climate, Geoarchaeological and Bioarchaeological Practices, Landscape Archaeology: a multidisciplinary approach to evaluate the use and the transformation of a Monastic Site (Jure Vetere, Italy)

This work is part of a multidisciplinary research project started on the archaeological site of Jure Vetere (region of Calabria, southern Italy). The excavation area is located on Sila Grande mountain (1100 m a.s.l.), 5 km west of San Giovanni in Fiore, where between the end of the XII century and the first decades of the XIII century a monastic settlement rose. The archaeological research, carried out by IBAM-CNR on the site, discovered a huge ecclesiastical building that features two different phases. Thanks to the multi-disciplinary approach applied to a "Landscape Archaeology" research, important information was collected due to the study of archaeological finds, written sources, ethnoarchaeological data, photo-interpretations, geological and geopedological research, pollen, botanic and archaeometric analyses. The palynological study on layers deposited in phases which preceded or were coeval to the life time of the monastery, provided the basis for the reconstruction of the ancient plant landscape of the site where the monastery was founded, and supplied the knowledge of the plant resources exploitation. Particular attention has been directed to the analysis of pedological horizons, burying the mediaeval building and its immediate neighbouring land, in order to evaluate its main characters and define the pedogenetic and geomorphic processes, coeval of the soil formation, which still less define the agrarian applications which assure subsistence to the religious community. The study integrated with climate data has permitted us to correlate the history of this settlement, with the different evolutive phases of the landscape, closely connected to the local and global climatic conditions coeval to the monastic settlement.