Landscape, plant remains and ecological data in prehistoric Sicily: a debate in human environmental sciences

Sicily represents a crucial area in the Mediterranean basin for its geographic position, ecological diversity, cultural heritage, and historical richness. The comprehension of human communities’ dynamics within their environmental context and their mutual connections is with no doubt one key approach for the development of archaeological studies in Sicily, through a real interdisciplinary and multiproxy research where anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic causes could be distinguished and analyzed. Previous studies attempted to investigate the connection between environmental changes and social and cultural dynamics in prehistoric time in Sicily and the possible influence on other Mediterranean cultures (Izdebski et al. 2015; Martini et al. 2009; Mercuri et al. 2011; Pacciarelli et al. 2015; Sadori et al. 2016; Zanchetta et al. 2013). The overall aim of this paper, through a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach, is to review the paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic results from lake sediments and the evidence from prehistoric contexts collecting archaeological (notably paleodemographic) and archaeobotanical (i.e. pollen and plant macro-remains) data in Sicily island. The paper will cover the chronological range from the late Pleistocene until the early historical times (~14000 – 2500 BP). National and international researches have been carried out in the last decades on the island to collect data both from lacustrine pollen sequences and archaeological sites. All these studies allow to put together for the first time the paleoecological information and compare them with cultural development of prehistoric human groups to verify how climatic oscillations can have affected prehistoric communities in settlement patterns, socio-economic changes, land use or other human activities.