ABSTRACT Soil health is best understood as a palimpsest of past land uses and therefore requires a long‐term perspective. Although human activity has shaped soils for millennia, soil health frameworks do not systematically incorporate the retrospective approaches that are now standard in many environmental disciplines. As a result, contemporary soil health indicators are often interpreted without recognising the deeper historical processes that have contributed to them. The palimpsest framework is an effective way to apply a long‐term perspective to soil health. Drawing on established uses of the palimpsest in archaeology and geology, the framework conceptualises soil properties as complex features shaped by both modern and historical management practices. Two case studies demonstrate how centuries‐old land uses remain measurable in present‐day soil nutrient levels and biodiversity, illustrating the practical value of this approach. Adopting a palimpsest perspective has several implications: it reframes how soil degradation is defined, is a fresh perspective on soil memory, and provides clearer guidance for soil management policies. Integrating archaeological knowledge into soil health assessments therefore offers a robust pathway toward more accurate interpretations and more sustainable soil use.

Deep-seated mythologies and powerful stereotypes have driven perceptions of mountain landscapes for millennia. Particularly damaging is the concept that mountains and mountain societies are static and stable, in both time and place. A critical approach replaces static and simplistic models of mountain practices with interaction among human and ecological communities within lively mountain landscapes. There are challenges to doing archaeological fieldwork in the mountains, but recent projects have shown how rich highland and rugged landscapes can be in archaeological material, particularly when systematic survey and historical analysis are combined with ethnological and ecological approaches. This is particularly productive when exploring the dynamic relationships among pastoralists, their animals, and their upland grazing grounds. Similarly, focusing on practices and socioecological relationships helps in understanding how human emotional connections with mountains can be expressed through everyday action and performance.

The region bordering the Mediterranean Sea offers historical archaeologists unique opportunities for developing in-depth interpretations of global/local connections. Archaeologists can learn from reading Fernand Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean and from thinking specifically about the role of intercultural trade in the region. Shipwrecks, when combined with terrestrial information, provide a particularly rich environment for study. Italian maiolica adds another dimension to the examination.

Rocks and trees are often central to the lives of human communities: their role is far more complex and meaningful than supplying resources, status, or symbolism. In a convivial landscape, rocks, trees, and people are deeply connected, showing elaborate and powerful interdependencies. In this article I explore the idea of conviviality through a series of examples from Archaic to early twentieth-century Cyprus. The Acropolis cliffs of Kourion show the fluidity of rock, constantly changing because of the effects of water, weather, and humanity. In the northern Troodos Mountains, trees and people have been highly interconnected: when human activities are relatively diverse and small-scale, the ensuing relationships are resilient and healthy for the whole socioecological community. Human societies can recognize and celebrate this conviviality through stories that grow up around particular rocks and trees, or through rituals focused on sacred stones or enacted by dancing around trees.

"Wine Jars and Jar Makers of Cyprus: The Ethnoarchaeology of Pitharia." Levant, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

A journal for exploring creative engagement with the past, especially through digital means. It publishes primarily what might be thought of as ‘paradata’ or artist’s statements that accompany playful and unfamiliar forms of singing the past into existence.

Rocks and trees are often central to the lives of human communities: their role is far more complex and meaningful than supplying resources, status, or symbolism. In a convivial landscape, rocks, trees, and people are deeply connected, showing elaborate and powerful interdependencies. In this article I explore the idea of conviviality through a series of examples from Archaic to early twentieth-century Cyprus. The Acropolis cliffs of Kourion show the fluidity of rock, constantly changing because of the effects of water, weather, and humanity. In the northern Troodos Mountains, trees and people have been highly interconnected: when human activities are relatively diverse and small-scale, the ensuing relationships are resilient and healthy for the whole socioecological community. Human societies can recognize and celebrate this conviviality through stories that grow up around particular rocks and trees, or through rituals focused on sacred stones or enacted by dancing around trees.

SUMMARYThis paper seeks to explore life during the post-medieval period in a small part of the Ochil Hills in Perthshire, Scotland, and in doing so, demonstrates how landscape archaeology can uncover stories which reflect the complexity and nuance of life in the past. Drawing on a range of approaches, this paper explores the stories uncovered through a programme of landscape archaeology. This includes considering the dramatic changes and reformations that have shaped the landscape over recent centuries, histories of specific people and places - and the relationship between the two. It asks questions of the role of archaeology in telling these stories and considers how a variety of approaches can reveal a multitude of voices and narratives from the past.

Storytelling is a powerful medium for communicating information, ideas, values and the 'aura' of the past to a wide range of audiences. It can engender closer listening and deeper engagement. Academic discourse, on the other hand, brings the benefits of reasoned argument, responsibility to the evidence and systematic referencing. For the academic storyteller, a hybrid narrative combines the strengths of both of these approaches: it encourages the audience to think through the context in much greater detail and explicitly make the connections between the different elements of evidence. It can also be transformative in terms of the teller's own perspective and values. To explore these ideas, I tell a story set in the Late Roman-period copper mine of Skouriotissa in Cyprus, where the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project recorded slag heaps, ceramics and a range of other archaeological remains. The story is told in my own voice, but incorporates an encounter with a mysterious figure who apparently has direct, sensory experience of the material I am recording and researching. Telling the story then enables me to reflect on the power and benefits of academic storytelling as a means of communication and research.

Far from being a simple annual round determined by the calendar, seasonality in human societies is a complex system of interdependence between humans and non-humans. It requires close attentiveness to the variability of soils, weather, topography, plants, and animals across both time and space. In this article, the author investigates mobile systems of interdependence that take advantage of topographical and seasonal variation. He uses a range of case studies from early modern Scotland and Cyprus, focusing on summer grazing in the uplands and lowland agriculture carried out by mountain communities. After a comparative discussion of seasonality, the article examines the role of topography and movement, and then puts the ‘margins at the centre’ in order to highlight the central role played by seasonal activity and movement in rural society.

The key to understanding a landscape is through its connections, which tie together people and environment within and beyond that landscape and across many different periods. This is particularly true of the northern face of the Ochil Hills in central Scotland, which is characterised by dense networks of connections between lowlands and uplands, local and regional. To trace those connections we integrate the results of walkover survey, aerial archaeology, excavations, documentary analysis and place name analysis, revealing significant continuities and differences in the networks and relationships that have connected this landscape across time and space. Iron Age hillforts used their prominence and monumentality to guide people along very specific routes across the Ochils. Regular seasonal movements of cattle and herders in the medieval and post-medieval periods were closely related to the agriculture and settlement they encountered on the way: this interaction can be clearly seen in the elaborate intertwining of paths, braided cattle tracks, farmsteads and enclosures, most strikingly in the 18th century. Such intricate connections across the landscape are equally keyed in to the specifics of particular locations and to much broader networks and historical change.

Social institutions such as the water-powered grain mills of Ottoman Cyprus are elaborately interconnected with a wide range of human and non-human players, from millers and villagers to water, gradient, stone and climate. When participants recognize their mutual dependencies and operate according to social and environmental limits, then following Ivan Illich we can call these watermills convivial tools. The European-owned sugar plantations, mills and refineries of medieval Cyprus, by contrast, divided and alienated their workforce, and their demands for water, labour, soil and fuel surpassed what their landscape and society could provide. They are, then, unconvivial tools. Conviviality is always precarious: it needs continual negotiation, conflict and compromise, as well as an acceptance of the mutual dependence of all participants, non-human and human. This politics of conviviality is particularly urgent in times of social and ecological crisis.

Soils provide a striking demonstration of conviviality, thanks to the intensity and abundance of lively interaction seething within them. Soils constitute and generate life precisely through the symbiotic interaction, collaboration and competition of an enormous range of partners. Engaging with some specific soils in central Cyprus demonstrates how this conviviality works. Soil-places are created by very precise combinations of soil players, both non-human and human. Humans can join these partners in helping the soil to grow, through constructions of check dams to catch sediments and moisture. They can use soil to construct houses, demonstrating deep local knowledge and close partnership with the soils, and often recognizing the conviviality that provides a foundation for their lives in the landscape. As our soils today are catastrophically degraded and lost, the need to engage with the conviviality of soil is all the more urgent.

This article challenges the polarization, still common in accounts of Ottoman Cyprus and elsewhere, of an oppressed, isolated peasantry and the power and connectedness of the elite. By integrating archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence, it examines the specific mechanisms of production, exchange and movement across the Cypriot landscape. The patterns of activities of the peasantry show not just a deep rooting in their community landscape but also a striking mobility and agency: they had a significant ability to negotiate, participate and protest in the distributed power system of the Ottoman empire, and show intense movement and widespread connections across the island and beyond. The elite participated in a series of regional and Mediterranean-wide networks, and had many opportunities to increase their wealth, political power and social position. But they were also deeply embedded in agricultural production and in the land. The landscape of Ottoman Cyprus, then, is characterized by intense interaction at all levels, by a highly connected peasantry as much as by a localized elite.