THE LIVED-IN LANDSCAPE

This monograph, produced within the MODLAND project (MUR Young Researchers – Next Generation EU), investigates how prehistoric communities of southeastern Italy inhabited and transformed their landscapes between approximately 4000 and 1000 cal. BCE. Grounding the analysis in Niche Construction Theory and phenomenological landscape theory, the author frames Copper and Bronze Age communities not as passive responders to environmental constraints but as active agents who reshaped soils, vegetation, and social meaning across generations. A dataset of 370 open-air archaeological contexts from Abruzzo, Molise, and Apulia is analysed through an integrated geocomputational framework combining MaxEnt species distribution modelling, spatial statistics, and radiocarbon summed probability distributions. The innovative application of MaxEnt at a regional scale allows settlement suitability surfaces to be modelled under conditions of archaeological uncertainty, revealing patterns of continuity and rupture from dispersed Copper Age hamlets to the long-lived fortified coastal centres of the Bronze Age. Quantitative outputs are consistently re-read through contextual case studies and ethnographic comparison, avoiding environmental determinism. The result is the first large-scale computational study of late prehistoric settlement in the southeastern Italian peninsula, and a methodological argument for integrating machine learning with social theory in landscape archaeology.