Ploughsoil Assemblages and Beyond: Some Interpretative Challenges

The present remarks derive from on-going top-ographic-archaeological projects focusing on North coastal Etruria and South Picenum. These studies apply a global archaeology approach that includes diachronic and interdisciplinary research. In our projects particular attention is being paid to palaeogeographic aspects. Processual methodol-ogy standards are applied to our research; never-theless, geomorphologic, spatial and quantitative evidence is integrated with qualitative and symbol-ic data to reconstruct all the anthropic activities. Some remarks will be made about the inform-ative potential of ploughsoil findings, landscape complexity, strategies in collecting and studying pottery and on the importance of considering the absence of particular categories of materials. Fol-lowing this global approach and its consequential theoretical framework and rigorous methodology, archaeologists will be able to take up the interpre-tative challenge of defining landscapes in terms of their different components: sites, off-sites and their historical-functional classification. Obviously, the objective and subjective standards used for these classifications have to be explained clearly, so that the research results of a district can be used for comparisons and large-scale analyses.