Field research and predictive modelling of global warming and desertification by environmental scientists in the Mediterranean has concentrated on the short term. In this paper, it is argued that collaboration between the historical sciences, especially archaeology, and the environmental sciences can provide a longer-term perspective on desertification in the Mediterranean. Such collaboration has taken place recently in the Vera basin (Almería, south-east Spain), with the financial support of the European Union. Details of the archaeological and historical sequences of occupation in the basin are given, before presenting the main trends in demography, settlement and political systems from 4000 BC until the present day. This is followed by details of the long-term record of degradation in the Vera basin. The paper concludes by using the long-term record to propose recommendations for the future management of this landscape.

During the third millennium cal BC, there were major changes in many aspects of Cypriot material culture, technology and economy which characterize the division between the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age on the island. Many innovations can be traced to Anatolian antecedents. These include a very wide array of domestic as well as agricultural and industrial technologies. Their nature and range make it possible to argue strongly for the movement of people to the island, rather than for other mechanisms of technology transfer and culture change. This identification of an intrusive group, with distinctive patterns of behaviour (habitus), opens up questions of prehistoric ethnicity, and the processes by which the initial maintenance of different lifeways by indigenous and settler communities eventually gave way to a common cultural system.

The study of landscape as social construction implies considering its economic and territorial dimensions, as much as its symbolic ones. A major topic in such kinds of studies is the reconstruction of the ways in which natural and social space was perceived by past societies. We ought to approach the project of building an archaeology of perception. One of the aims of such a research programme would be the evaluation of the effects of natural and artificial landscape features on past human observers. This paper will argue that a possible strategy for studying these dimensions of past landscapes could be based on the systematic analysis of the visual features of prehistoric monuments and in the characterization of the scenic effects and vistas related to them. A detailed analysis of the pattern of location of megalithic monuments and of their visibility and intervisibility allows us to recognize certain regularities which display an intention to take account of monuments by provoking dramatic artificial effects. In such a way, we could approach a phenomenology of prehistoric perception without falling into merely subjective solutions. This study is based on a systematic review of the megalithic monuments from Sierra de Barbanza (north-west Iberia). Its main aims are: (1) the proposal for a theoretical and methodological study of these phenomena, combined with; (2) a case-study to reconstruct those monumental strategies used to shape cultural landscapes in Neolithic Europe, and; (3) the explanation of continuities and changes of these traditions.

During the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, garden cemeteries were founded in most cities in Britain. Their characteristic appearance owes much to a British tradition of naturalistic landscape design but has particular resonances in the context of death and mourning in the nineteenth century. This article considers some of the factors that have been significant in the development of the British landscape cemetery, including public health, class relationships and foreign influences (particularly that of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris). It is argued that none of these things explains the popularity of this particular form of cemetery in Britain; rather, the garden cemetery offered an appealing and appropriate landscape for remembering the dead and mediating the relationship between the dead and the bereaved.

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the ‘homeland’, form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the ‘domestication’ of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its ‘materialization’ through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.