Paesaggi storici, tradizioni e identità culturali. Tre anni di una ricerca multidisciplinare

This paper outlines the methodological framework and main outcomes of a three-year multidisciplinary research programme developed within CHANGES – Spoke 1, focusing on historical landscapes, traditions, and cultural identities. Landscape is approached as a dynamic, stratified, and relational system, shaped over the long term by the interaction between environmental processes and human communities. Interpreted as a palimpsest and as a “context of contexts”, landscape provides the analytical framework within which material and immaterial heritage elements acquire meaning through diachronic and functional relationships. The project adopts an explicitly interdisciplinary perspective, integrating archaeology (from prehistory to the contemporary period), environmental sciences, history, anthropology, architecture, spatial planning, and digital humanities. Research activities combine traditional archaeological practices with advanced diagnostic techniques, remote sensing, LiDAR, GIS and WebGIS, HBIM, and large-scale digital atlases, applied to a wide range of urban, rural, coastal, underwater, and marginal landscapes across Italy. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of landscape knowledge in heritage management, territorial planning, and participatory processes, in line with the European Landscape Convention and the Faro Convention. The paper argues that historical landscape archaeology, conceived as a holistic and participatory practice, represents a strategic tool for sustainable and culturally grounded territorial transformation.