Based on Appadurai’s concept of locality and neighbourhood, this concluding chapter situates the contributions of this volume as well as the author’s own research in Italy in a multidisciplinary and multiculturally long-term comparative perspective. Introducing the concept of ‘qualities of locality’, it discusses landscape properties, settlement (dis)continuity, culture contact and cult as basic elements in the shaping of neighbourhood and the production of locality in Indigenous Mediterranean Iron Age contexts. At times, it also reveals the fragility of the production of locality as a social achievement, as mentioned by Appadurai.

We introduce the Ising model and spin glass theory. The fundamental concepts of replicas and the landscape of the replica symmetry breaking transition are reviewed. Paradigmatic models such as the Edwards–Anderson and Sherrington–Kirkpatrick Hamiltonians are analyzed. The Parisi ansatz and its consequences (in terms of the phase diagram) are discussed.

We introduce the simplest photonic spin glass by leveraging the so-called random energy model (REM), which allows one to derive a phase diagram with reasonable mathematical complexity. We introduce some concepts of nonequilibrium thermodynamic phases in a multimode photonic system.

This chapter considers sacred space and the battles surrounding its possession, uses and understandings of the sacred more generally, including the wider significance of the landscape itself as a sacred space. Irish Catholic approaches were nuanced, such as the distinctions drawn between newly-built Protestant churches and older buildings that could be ‘re-catholicised’. The numerous rites and practices that this entailed are explored, showing that while notions of the holy and control of space were important to Irish Catholics, there was, nonetheless, great variety in how that was expressed. Spaces such as churches and churchyards are also examined as locations where both sacrality and ethnic tensions overlapped, with disputes surrounding burial showcasing Irish Catholic hostility to Protestants and Protestantism as heresy but also as foreign bodies contaminating Irish soil. The politics of church possession is another theme, which is shown to have explosive potential for intra-confessional conflict, as Irish Catholics debated and fought over the control of churches as a central demand of their cause, leading to conflict among themselves.

Roman land division systems or centuriations are a widespread phenomenon and as such a particularly interesting lens through which to assess Rome’s lasting impact on rural landscapes. This chapter discusses three case studies (the Pontine plain, central Italy; the Po plain; and the coast of northern Hispania Tarraconensis) and shows although they show some degree of standardization in form, variability and context-specificity are key to the physical manifestations of centuriations, and thus to understanding their impacts.

Visual popular culture flourished in the nineteenth century. Museums began democratizing to include wider audiences, even to the extent that some hosted exotic objects, live people, and animals. These sensationalist or “dime” museums were best represented by P. T. Barnum’s American Museum (1841–1865) and its dioramas and panoramas, objects, illusions and stunts, and animal and human performances. Popularization of visual culture also occurred in the commercial growth of book and magazine illustrations as well as in wall art print reproductions, all of which admitted the fine arts into middle-class parlors. Photographs and daguerreotypes, especially portraiture and landscapes, became fashionable. Outside the home, an increasingly urbanized environment admitted new visual elements in a landscape of sensory overload. Broadsides, billboards, and wall posters all contributed to democratizing spectatorship, and visual spectatorship itself became an essential component of urban living. New visual culture reshaped both who could see and who was seen.

This paper explores the evolution, transformation, and adaptation of settlement patterns in Roman-period Southwest Asia. By examining three case study areas—the Amuq Plain in southern Turkey, the Balikh River Valley, and the Upper Khabur Basin in northeastern Syria—it investigates subsistence strategies and modes of landscape exploration. Through a detailed analysis of archaeological and historical data, this chapter aims to shed light on how local communities adapted to changing socio-economic and ecological condition in this extended borderland.

How might we read Paul Laurence Dunbar as a poet of place and landscape? Dunbar wrote his poetry in an era where local color, regionalism, and realism were dominant forces in American literature, and his poetry engages in complex ways with these generic traditions. At the same time, Dunbar’s poetry, particularly his writing in non-dialect verse, is deeply influenced by his lifelong study of and engagement with British Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions, and the modes of environmental representation through apostrophe, lyric meditation, and balladic narrative central to these traditions. I read Dunbar’s explorations of place and landscape in dialogue with these intersecting influences, in and through which Dunbar develops a sustained reflection on struggle, displacement, violence, and unfreedom as the fundamental conditions of Black experience in the post-Reconstruction era United States. Less oriented by local specificity or realist detail, evocations of landscape and place in Dunbar’s work engender abstract and self-reflexive meditations on terrains of anti-Black violence and pain as well as sites of retreat and resilience in the face of these conditions.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).

The essay explores pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Dodona, in Epirus, through a phenomenological lens, aiming to reconstruct the experience of ancient pilgrims. The study highlights the significance of landscape, movement, and motivation, on the basis that Dodona’s natural features and architectural layout deeply influenced pilgrims’ perceptions. The phenomenological approach draws on landscape archaeology, analyzing human interaction with sacred spaces. The analysis examines not only motivations behind oracular activity, but also other purposes, such as attending the Naia festival, and emphasizes the interplay of visibility and movement as pilgrims approached the sanctuary. Although reconstructing individual experiences is challenging, common patterns in collective behavior, such as rituals, processions, and religious practices, offer insights into the ancient pilgrimage experience. In short, the study uses literary, epigraphic, and material evidence to discuss how Dodona’s sacred landscape shaped its visitors’ religious and emotional experiences, contributing to a broader understanding of Greek pilgrimage traditions.

An introduction to the idea of national identity, the question of its modernity, and its relation to ethnic and racial identity. The possibility that England uniquely lacked such an identity, or that the whole English population was never immersed in it, is also considered.

This chapter explores the evolving depiction of the Land of Israel in Hebrew poetry, reflecting the creation of modern Hebrew culture. It contrasts ancient expressions of longing for Zion with the transformed image of Israel as a tangible landscape. The chapter examines how poets from various Zionist immigration periods depicted their encounters with the land, ranging from messianic ecstasy to realistic sobriety. Each era produced poets who articulated their complex experiences, as exemplified by Noah Stern’s poem “Smells” (1935), which captures the blend of hallucinations, disappointments, tortures, pleasures, closeness, and alienation. Each poem is a new chapter in the ongoing narrative of encountering the land.