 First of all, do you hear me? Yes. First of all, thank you very much for the invitation for the undeserved introduction. It's a real honor to be asked to do a keynote at the EAA. This is the most important archaeological conference in Europe and one of the most important in the world. And the topics addressed here have the potential to set the research agenda for the future. For this reason, I would like my speech to be nothing more than the occasion to discuss about mountain archaeology, its current state of research, and its present and future priorities. In particular, I'm interested in exploring the role of mountain archaeology in our society and how mountain archaeology can contribute to addressing some of the global challenges that we're facing. For this reason, I hope you will participate in the discussion at the end of the presentation, asking questions and making comments. I will start with a quick overview of the current challenges of mountain research in general and mountain archaeology in particular. Then I will present some examples from my recent research. Considering what we are, my attention will be focused primarily on the Alps. And considering my personal expertise, my examples will investigate the high altitudes. Nevertheless, I think that the implications of what I'm going to talk about go beyond this mountain region. And are the results of a refraction that includes the methodological and theoretical foundations of mountain archaeology. Mountains are the backbone of every continent as they cover nearly the 25% of the Earthland surface. Mountains are water towers of critical importance as they supply over the 70% of the fresh water that we drink and use for agricultural and industrial activities. Mountains are crucial reservoirs of biodiversity. Consider that one fourth of the world's biodiversity is in mountain regions. But mountains are even more. They are home to the 13% of world's population, nearly 1 billion people. They host 60% of biosphere reserve and 30% of world heritage sites. It is self-evident that mountain protection is a strategic and global priority for national and international decision makers. In our continent, the European Union and several national governments have devised various plans to promote a socially and ecological sustainable management of mountain regions. The urgency for the implementation of these plans is primarily related to the vulnerability of mountain environments and the increasing intensity of the threats that compromise their preservation. Climate change is the main matter of concern. Glaciers are retreating at an unprecedented pace. The consequences of these are not only limited to the loss of unique landscapes to which local communities and tourists associate different meanings and values. The consequences extend to the functioning of mountain ecosystems as a whole, like water availability, floods and landslide hazards. Climate change is also associated with more extreme weather events and mountain regions are particularly exposed to these events. A recent example is the unprecedented windstorm that destroyed hectares of old forest in the Dolomites with devastating consequences for local ecology and economy. Mitigating the impact of all these transformation is extremely urgent for the present and the future of mountain communities. But this is not the only challenge that policymakers have to face. Due primarily to the increasing touristic importance of mountain regions, which attract 20% of world tourists every year, the human footprint on mountain environment, especially in Europe, is rapidly growing. The ecological pressure of this industry is complemented by the effect of ill-managed mining and by mountain farming, whose intensity has steadily increasing during the last 50 years. The most visible consequences of this are the profound transformation of mountain landscapes with the construction of new roads, infrastructures, resorts, plantations that often deplete the distinctive character of these landscapes. Less visible, but more long-term consequences are associated with soil erosion, loss in biodiversity, and malfunctioning of local ecosystems with exasperated aforementioned impact of climate change. In a nutshell, during the last few decades, mountain socio-ecological systems have become more exposed to endogenous and exogenous perturbations. Increasing the resilience of these systems has become a critical and urgent mission for governments, organizations, and other stakeholders. Today, the primary goal of sustainable mountain development is to reconcile the needs of mountain peoples and the duty to protect mountain environments. This means that plans for poverty, eradication, and food security have to be designed within a framework of good environmental practice. Last year, several international partners pledged to ensure that sustainable mountain development and mountain ecosystem conservation will be integrated in 2030 sustainable development agenda of the United Nations. These, in turn, has triggered a series of initiatives at local, national, and international level aimed at answering this call for action. The challenges policymakers and local communities are facing are serious and unprecedented and require innovative solutions. Can archaeology contribute to informing these solutions? Can archaeology provide evidence of good or bad land use practice than my influence current practice? In a nutshell, does archaeology have a role in sustainable mountain development? These are the main questions that I would like to address in my presentation. In fact, these are questions that are not only limited to archaeology of mountain landscapes, but there are much wider implications for archaeological research to cure. The overarching question is, can we learn anything from the past that might help us understanding the future? I believe that mountain regions represent the ideal framework to address this compelling issue of modern archaeology. The persistence of small-scale societies in many mountain regions and the peculiar character of mountain farming suggests that local knowledge might have a significant importance for future landscape management. Archaeology can provide a solid understanding of the origin and evolution of these local knowledge, thus improving our still superficial perception of mountain communities. The current general perception of mountain communities is this, ancestral lifestyle, perfectly adapt to the marginal and harsh environment of the mountains. The farming strategies of local communities safeguard and protect mountain ecosystems because they are the result of a long and slowly forged synergy between humans and nature. Mountain activities are unchanged for millennia. They are the vestige of traditional practice surviving from the past. The last century has seen the decadence and transformation of mountain lifeways overpowered by modern economy and this has disruptive effect on mountain landscapes and environments. None of these is actually true. We are projecting into an unspecified remote past what we perceive as old fashioned as pre-modern. The same concept of traditional and tradition is vague and it doesn't have a real temporal dimension. Besides, the ecological sustainability of our traditional farming strategy is largely speculative. We assume that modern strategies are more harmful for the environment than traditional strategies but these argument requires reliable assessments and a clear definition of what traditional is. This perspective of mountain communities and their practices is not simply the product of generalization and modernist perception. For a long time, we have known very little about the history of mountain communities not only about the origin and the past but also about the recent evolution. These led us to assume that local mountain knowledge is a legacy of past adaptive processes. In 1949, Fernand Brodell in its influential two-volume milestone the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean word in the age of Philip II defined the Mediterranean mountains, especially the Alps as factories of man. Their development was constrained by the endemic dearth of resources and their economy was consequently limited to the subsistence level. This was not only his opinion, this was the average perception in that period and the marginality of mountain regions was taken for granted by large parts of the scientific community. 40 years after Brodell in 1988, Harriet Rosenberg revolutionized this preconception. By studying the documentary sources available in locker archives, she managed to reconstruct the history of a small community of Abrié in the French Alps from the 16th to the 20th century. Her research showed that this village had a complex historical trajectory. It was economically flourished and socially advanced until the end of the ancient regime. Its current underdevelopment was the result of socio-economical processes that marginalized mountain productions in the last two centuries. She also pointed out that Abrié was not an exception in the French Alps and that all the communities showed similar trajectories. Rosenberg's book is called A Negotiated Word because she claimed that Alpine communities in the past had enough political power to be able to challenge and influence the decisions of central authorities. It is clear that our perception of mountain communities as isolated, unchanged, and traditional is just a result of the impoverishment they experienced during the transition to modernity. This is related to our ignorance of the history of mountain peoples, which is in turn associated with the scarce attention that historians and archeologists have paid for the mountains for a long time. Since we have been talking about ecological sustainability and landscape management, I would like to provide another example that is directly related to land use strategies. We know that until the first forest record was introduced in France in the early 19th century, goats were an essential part of small scale farming in the Alps and in many other mountain regions in Europe. Since then, policymakers started a proper war on goats. Goats were accused of depleting the forests because unlike sheep and cows, they really like leaves and twigs. They were accused of being the main driver of overgrazing because they are insatiable. They were accused of triggering soil loss and erosion processes where their hooves and most importantly, goat husbandry was considered an ineffective way of producing food because goats are small in size, they produce small quantities of milk and their milk is not suitable for the production of butter. However, as mentioned above, goats were the cornerstone of livestock farming because they adapted to any climatic and ecological condition, they could be used to exploited uncultivable rangelands and they didn't have to be stabled during the winter. Goats meat and goat's cheese were important food resources for the poorest communities of the European mountains. The rationalization of resource management during the 19th century led policymakers to put pressure on local communities for getting rid of the goats and replacing them with other animals. Some farmers were incentivized to buy sheep whose wool was in especially meat was more valuable on the market. In other areas there was an increasing specialization towards dairy cattle subsidized by the institutions. Cows were much more high maintenance than goats but their value is much higher on the market because of the high milk provision and increasing demand of cheese and butter. Pastoral strategies that we see today in the mountains are the direct result of these processes. They look traditional to us but they are the product of a rationalization and specialization of farming and land use. The ancestral strategies that we attribute to the mountains are instead the consequence of historical processes triggered by political and socioeconomic drivers. Environmental scientists are still monitoring whether these transformation has guaranteed a more sustainable management of mountain environments. But what we already know is that it has contributed to decreasing the resilience of fragile mountain communities enhanced their economic and social difficulties. As expected, our understanding of socio-ecological systems in mountain regions decreases the farther we go into the past. For a long time our knowledge of ancient and prehistoric mountain communities and their interaction with the environment has been confined to the lowlands. Here is where permanent settlements were located and most of the productive activities took place including arable farming. However, it is quite unlikely that all the activities clustered in the lowlands. In the historical and recent periods the uplands were intensively exploited for animal grazing, hay making and hunting during the summer providing essentially complementary resources for local subsistence. These led the archeologists to take for granted that Pazmontan societies took advantage of different ecosystems at different altitudes. Very little archeological evidence was available for the uplands and this death of evidence hindered the reconstruction of local economies. A significant example is prehistoric pale dwellings around the Alps. They recently become UNESCO heritage site. Archeological investigation of pale dwellings started during the 19th century and provided critical information about prehistoric life ways in the mountains. The remarkable preservation of organic material in these archeological contexts shed new light on the evolution of early farming practices. But again, very little information was available for the uplands around these sites. Archeological research in the high mountains was essentially focused on the last hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic. Archeologists just assumed that the high altitudes were seasonally used just like they were in the historical period. Yet again, they were projecting into the past what we know about the historical periods, rely on the principle of uniformity and inertia that, as we have seen, was attributed to mountain communities. Our knowledge of human interaction with mountain environments was partial, inaccurate, and speculative. These affected our understanding of the effect of farming practices on the environment. Paleocologists were indeed investigating the transformation of mountain ecosystems and high altitude, but their primary focus was on the effect of climate change on visitation and the impact of human was often neglected. As we know, change happens slowly. Some archaeologists in the 1980s had already acknowledged that the lack of research at high altitude was a limitation for our comprehension of past sociocological dynamics. And a small number of archaeologists had already pioneered archaeological surveys in the uplands. But change often benefits from punctual events that accelerate the process. For the archaeology of high mountains, this event happened on September 19, 1991. Two German hikers were crossing an ice patch at 3,300 meters of elevation in the Ötsal Alps near the border between Italy and Austria. And they noticed the body of a man emerging from the ice. They couldn't know that this man was 5,300 years old, a perfectly preserved mummy that revolutionized our knowledge of European Neolithic, and also paved the way for the development of mountain archaeology. The Iceman stimulated new research questions for archaeologists and paleocologists, questions that could be answered only through a more solid knowledge of prehistoric occupation of the high mountains. New archaeological projects started in the Alps and in other mountain regions of Europe. And paleocologists paid more attention to the identification of possible markers of human influence on alpine and subalpine environments. Today, the archaeological investigation of meat and high altitude is a growing subfield of landscape and environmental archaeology. I call it mountain archaeology. The first results of the pioneer project started in the 1990s, the acknowledgement of the relevance of the data gathered in the mountains, as well as the aforementioned increasing focus of different stakeholders on mountain conservation led to a rapid increase of upland-focused archaeological and multidisciplinary research around Europe. Fieldwork projects are retrieving new archaeological data related to the seasonal occupation of the high altitudes. Paleobotany and georchaeology are providing evidence of the long-term effects of human activities on mountain environments. Most of these new projects are diachronic. They are not focused on the acquisition of data for a specific chronological period. They are interested in the analysis of human-mountain interaction over time to understand how it has changed and what the drivers of change were in the past. Papers presenting and discussing data from high mountains are increasingly common in some of the main international archaeological journals, edited volumes and monographs have been published in the last few years. The main international archaeological conferences have sessions and round table dedicated to this topic and their number is growing year by year. And as Thomas has already mentioned earlier, there is a commission called the Home Commission that gathers some of the archaeologists that work on high-altitude archaeology. Mountain archaeologists are developing new fieldwork methods adjusted to the characteristics of upland landscapes. Mountain archaeology is still in its infancy. Due to its relatively young age, we don't have big synthesis that address the main questions behind the investigation of high altitudes. In addition to that, it takes several years for a mountain archaeology project to collect archaeological and paleological data set and provide reasonable inferences. Furthermore, the new archaeological knowledge of upland landscapes has stimulated new research questions which have changed the research agenda of mountain archaeology in the last few years. Despite all that, it is evident that mountain archaeology has already revolutionized our comprehension of human-mountain interactions. We have learned, for example, that the evolution of human strategies at high altitude has not been linear. It has experienced numerous fluctuations in intensity whose chronology varies in different mountain regions and in different sectors of the same mountain region. We are still trying to explain these processes and to understand the drivers of change, but this is certainly one of the most interesting aspects of mountain archaeology today. A lot of research has been carried out to understand origin and evolution of pastoralism and transhumans. These two key issues are still widely debated, but now we have a better idea of the complex processes that led to their emergence. A lot of research has focused on pouring, mining, and metallurgy at high altitude. The results of the research have complemented the data available for the lowlands and have highlighted the importance of high mountains for raw material provision since prehistoric times. Comprehensive investigation of rock art sites and ritual sites have been carried out in the last decades. These have shown that the high altitudes were not only occupied for exploiting their resources, but also for their symbolic and religious value. All this new information enabled a much clearer comprehension of the integration between uplands and lowlands and of the role of high altitudes for the economy and subsistence on mountain communities. Now we know that this role has significantly changed over time and we cannot assume a long-term continuation of seasonal activities for thousands of years. In some periods, the high altitudes were probably occupied and exploited like they were in recently historical phases and their economic function for mountain communities was also similar. In other periods, seasonal strategies carried out in the uplands were completely different with few analogs in recent phases. In these chronologies, evidently, the importance of the uplands was different and therefore the whole local subsistence and economy were different. Only the continuation of research and possibly the use of novel interpretative methods will enable us to properly understand these dynamics and to produce reliable long-term reconstructions of the economic and social history of the mountains. But mountain archeology has also contributed to changing our perspective on mountain landscapes. From archeological and paleogeological research, it is clear that human agency changed the aspects of upland landscapes much earlier than previously expected. High mountains have undergone complex processes of transformation where human and natural factors interplay processes that shape mountain landscapes as we see them today. The entropization of high mountains has not been geographically homogeneous and most importantly, it has not been temporarily continuous as pointed out above. The general trend is to work a progressive increase of human pressure on mountain environment but there are specific periods when this process reverses and the evidence of human impact declines. Besides, different areas experience the same processes of transformation in different periods, producing a mosaic of local historical ecologies and landscape histories. Addressing this evolution and its complexity is beyond the scope of this presentation. One thing is worth noticing though. The new data provided by mountain archeology suggests that upland landscapes are generated by long and complex dynamics rather than being the product of ancestral, univocal adaptation of human activities to mountain environments. Traditional land use at high altitude is the result of historical developments triggered by socioeconomic drivers, climate oscillation and other punctuated events. In order to protect today's mountain landscapes, we need to understand their long history and in particular how humans have contributed to this history. It might be opinion one of the most exciting results of this recent research is the evidence that not all the past practices have always been environmentally friendly. Different projects have demonstrated that early deforestation triggered slow processes and these had durable consequences downstream, increasing flood hazard in the valley bottom. In some areas, intensive animal grazing led to soil loss and depletion of vegetation with serious effects on farming yields. The effects of mining related activities on high mountains vegetation are well known and they are turned out to be much older than previously assumed. On the other hand, in other high altitude areas, an increase in biodiversity and improvement on soil quality correlated with specific grazing or watering activities is recorded and there is evident that negative effect of specific activities on the environment has been mitigated in later phases. After the consequences of these activities became traumatic. A growing number of multidisciplinary studies bridging archeological research and environmental sciences are demonstrating and sustainability of past practices should not be taken for granted. Small scale farming activities adapted to the characteristic of local environment might have unexpected consequences for the environment that are difficult to monitor for local communities. However, examples of unsustainable landscape management should not lead us to discard completely the role of local adaptation. There are several well-documented examples of good practice and mitigation strategies which should be used as references for future sustainable development and resilience to global change. What mountain archeology is telling us is that the historical evolution of landscape management strategies has to be investigated in detail at a local level. Landscape management is largely the product of trial and error and assessing the errors of local communities and how they learned from their errors can provide important lessons for the future. The discovery of the Iceman and the retreat of glaciers triggered another important branch of research glacial archeology. Several projects have started in the last few years and exceptional pieces of material culture have been found. These projects enabled the identification of ancient and prehistoric roots across the glaciers which were previously totally unknown. In the Alpine region, for example, Neolithic objects found in some glaciers largely predate the earliest archeological sites recorded at high altitude in the same areas or in surrounding valleys. This shows once more that absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence, but beyond that, it provides clear evidence that prehistoric mountain communities were moving and that they were moving across the mountain ranges at high altitude. The centrality of extreme elevation since prehistoric time is becoming increasingly evident. High passes that today we consider marginal had a much different importance in the past and glacial archeology plays a key role in debunking these preconceptions. Furthermore, glacial archeologists work very closely with the glaciologists in order to understand how climate fluctuations influence the accessibility of the investigated ice patches. Advancements and retreats of glaciers in the past might have influenced the connections between different watersheds, changed the mobility at high altitude and also affected the occupation of the upland pastures. Studying the human interaction with glaciers provides critical insights on how human communities cope with change at high altitude in the past and how connectivity has evolved in mountain regions since prehistoric times. The archeology of upland landscapes and the archeology of glaciers and ice patches are contributing to debunking several myths about the marginality and the inertia of human strategies at high altitude. New data available for the high mountains are integrated with increasing amount of archeological information provided by the lowlands. Today we have a much better understanding of social ecological dynamics in the mountains during the Holocene and the Anthropocene as well as during the latest phases of the Pleistocene. Our reconstructions of the past are no longer affected by a priori assumptions and we are now aware that traditional practices are the results of a complex evolution rather than a simple adaptation. The same can be said for upland environments. The influence of human activities on high mountains is largely acknowledged today and it's intensively investigated. This new archeological and paleocological knowledge is changing our approach to environmental and landscape policies in the mountains. Wilderness policies, for examples, were really popular in the past as human role for the ecosystem functioning was thought to be less significant than what it turned out to be. Now conservation policies are increasingly considering that we live in the Anthropocene and that the role of human groups in mountain ecosystem is more functionally important and chronologically deeper than previously thought. Nevertheless, traditional practices are still often removed from their historical framework and the general equation is traditional practice equal best practice. Interestingly, our improved knowledge of the past does not necessarily translate into an improved understanding of the present. This is one of the key challenges of our disciplines promoting the knowledge of past and long-term dynamics in the mountains as critical elements to inform future development and conservation policies. I say one of the key challenges because I'm aware that there are different challenges that influence the agenda of mountain archeology, landscape abandonment, mountain heritage management, sustainable tourism, among the others. The analysis of these challenges is way beyond the scope of my presentation, but I believe that mountain archeology can significantly contribute to all these decision-making priorities. So far, I've provided a general overview about the issues, opportunities, and mission of mountain archeology. This is the ideal baseline to present some examples directly related to what I've been doing in the Alps over the last 10 years. I will focus on one of the most relevant traditional practices in the Alps and in many other mountain regions in Europe, cheese making. Daily production is extremely important in the economy of the Alps and of Switzerland in particular. Most of the gourmet cheeses in Europe come from mountain regions and many of them are protected by the EU law which safeguards their distinctive protocol of production. Mountain cheese has become increasingly important in the last decades due to the growing demand for local organic food products, but cheese is also part of the intangible heritage of mountain communities and it promotes social cohesion and a connection with the landscape. Traditionally, mountain dairy farming includes the use of different altitudinal zones in different seasons. The main productive period is during the summer when animals are kept in the high altitude pastures and cheese produced in seasonal dairies. Traditional dairy farming is promoted to foster sustainable management of mountain environments. There is some evidence that the abandonment of this practice might lead to a depletion of upland ecosystems, but this inference is based on ecological assessments that only include the last two centuries. The long-term environmental consequences of cheese making have never been investigated. Mainly because the origin and evolution of mountain dairy strategies are still poorly understood. Neolithic communities in the Alps exploited and processed the milk of domesticated ruminants. We know it from age and sex-providing phonol assemblages as well as from artifacts associated with milk processing. Residue analysis, recently carried out by Spangenberg on poachers from the Neolithic lake dwelling of Arvamblaike, provide direct evidence of cheese production, but dairy produced in Neolithic alpine villages is not a surprise. Biarcheological research carried out in other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean suggests that dairy economy was probably part of the Neolithic package since the beginning. However, such scientific evidence does not prove that this early dairy economy took advantage of different altitudinal zones in the mountains, as it happens in traditional dairy farming. The earliest clearly pastoral sites that I altitude in the Alps date to the late Neolithic period, but there is no evidence that these sites were associated to dairy production. The earliest direct evidence of dairy production dates to the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. An international research group, which included Thomas Raidmeyer, Oliver Craig, Kevin Walsh and myself, carried out residue analysis on poachers found at high altitude in the Silvretta Massive between Switzerland and Austria. These poachers came from four different upland sites dated to the late Neolithic, early Bronze Age, early Iron Age and late Iron Age. Only the Iron Age pots contain dairy lipids. These suggested that the production of cheese in the uplands in the Silvretta Massive started at the beginning of the second millennium BC and that earlier sites were probably associated with a different pastoral strategy. Besides, the poachers with dairy lipids were discovered within drystone huts and enclosures, which are the earliest drystone structures in the area. The idea, therefore, is that there must be a correlation between the appearance of these facilities and the beginning of summer dairy. Summer dairy in a high altitude, historically, has a specific economic purpose. Taking advantage of the open pastures available at high altitude to increase cheese production and relieve the pressure of livestock on lowland fields. These, in turn, suggests a higher specialization in dairy farming during the late 2nd and 1st millennium BC and growing importance of dairy products for local economy and subsistence. The construction of drystone structures suggests a change in land management correlated with the emergence of upland dairy. Agitope analysis of animal bones from the same area carried out by Redmire and other colleagues shows a change in livestock mobility between the Neolithic and the latest phases of the Bronze Age. This switch from long-range to short-range seasonal movement matches quite well with the assumed change in land management, a more local and intensive exploitation of the uplands associated with the creation of durable seasonal infrastructures and triggered by a decisive shift in productive economy. The emergence of summer dairy is also correlated to a series of other transformations. On the one side, the importance of cheese for local subsistence seems to increase. Agitope analysis carried out by Mogadam and colleagues on human remains from the neighboring regions of Valais show a high reliance on animal proteins during the Iron Age. The authors suggest that this might indicate a higher consumption of cheese in this period. It can be reasonably argued that the social and economic importance of pastoral exploitation of the high altitudes was probably comparable to the historical period or even higher. The origin of summer dairy had important effects on mountain environments too. And this might be very useful to understand the correlation between human practices and sustainable management in the past. Human pressure on the mountain ecosystems of the Silvretta Massif seems to increase progressively during the Iron Age. These different pressures on the environment seems to be triggered by the change in land management associated with dairy economy. Further research is necessary to confirm this correlation. But if confirmed, it would be extremely interesting for environmental policies. Human impact on environment is not simply related to the number of animals grazed, neither exclusively to the type of animals grazed, but also to the pastoral strategies undertaken. These connection between environmental chains and pastoral strategies are difficult to investigate in the last century, as it has been done so far. Mountain archaeology provides the ideal time scale to address such complicated feedback processes whose effects should be monitored over centuries or millennia. An interesting archaeological issue is the relatively low number of high mountain pastoral sites dated to the Roman period in the Alps. Compared to the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, the Roman period is archaeologically underrepresented. These suggest a decrease in the intensity of human present at the high altitude, possibly related to a decrease in the importance of pastoralism for the economy of mountain communities. Building on my ethnarchological research carried out in different parts of the Alps, I have suggested an alternative explanation. I argue that the decline of archaeological evidence in the Roman period is related to a shift in the productive focus of pastoral strategies. We know that wolf-focused transhumans was really, was very economically important in the Alps during the Roman period. Ethnographic analogs suggest that these strategies associated with a more mobile land management practice than dairy-focused pastoralism. Transhuman shepherds often use ephemeral structures, which are much more difficult to identify archaeologically at high altitude. Therefore, an alternative explanation to the low number of Roman upland sites might be a lower archaeological visibility. It is possible that, at least in some areas of the Alps, small-scale, dairy-focused pastoralism was replaced by large-scale wolf-focused transhumans. This can be a further confirmation that pastoral strategies are not simply adaptive, but they are a product of historical development. They are deeply influenced by the socio-economical strategies of mountain communities, which in turn are connected to broader socioeconomic processes. The high mountain environment in the Roman period reflects the complexity and non-linearity of land management change. Some areas provide clear paleocological evidence of rewilding, which suggests an actual decreasing intensity of human occupation. For some sectors of the Alps, the abandonment of the uplands is evident. In other areas, like the Silvretta Massive, there is a continuation or even an increase in human pressure on the environment, which contrasts with the general decline of archaeological evidence. In this case, the transition from dairy-focused local pastoralism to wolf-focused transhumans seems a valid explanation. There are also other sectors of the Alps where paleobotanical markets and archaeological evidence concur to suggest a continuation or even an intensification of human occupation. This diversity clearly shows that the same dynamics were not happening everywhere at the same time, and that high mountain landscape developed in different ways, influenced by specific local phenomena. Archaeological and paleoecological research in the Alps is still ongoing, and it's too early to provide reliable inferences and reconstructions of these non-linear processes. But this preliminary overview warns us of the risks of generalization. Local mountain environments are the product of their local history, which is specific and idiosyncratic. And their history has to have a prominent position in the development of local management plans. Relying on historical inferences drawn from other areas might affect the effectiveness of future plans. As mentioned above, today, cheese making is an important economic strategy and intangible heritage for the Alps. And it is also considered of critical importance for mountain ecology. However, traditional upland daring has substantially changed during the 20th century. Cheese is now produced in modern structures, and the production procedures follow international health and safety standards. There are very few areas in the Alps where this transition towards the industrialization of cheese making has not happened yet. One is the Montregalese in the Italian maritime Alps. Here, cheese has been produced by hand in seasonal dry stone structures until the early 2000s. Health and safety policies together with the competition of industrial cheese making have determined the recent collapse of this production and the conversion of local pastoralism to non-dairy livestock. I've recently carried out an ethnological research in this sector of the Alps. My research questions were quite straightforward and correspond to what I have been discussing earlier in this presentation. What is the origin of traditional cheese making strategy in Montregalese? Is it a result of adaptation to local environment or, again, the product of historical forces? What is the ecological footprint of this strategy in the area? And how has this ecological footprint changed after the collapse of traditional economy? The origin of this pastoral system and the chronology of the associated structures cannot be easily estimated using historical sources. There is some evidence of the historical roots of cheese production in this area, but it is not clear whether it was related to the dry stone structures that characterize the local landscape. As an archaeologist, the best way for me to tackle this issue was to investigate one of these structures using the stratigraphic method. We opened two trenches, one of which intercepted a multi-layer fireplace. Radiocarbon dating and material culture from the fireplace confirmed that the structure was in use at least since the 15th, 16th centuries AD. These suggest that traditional summer daring in the Montregalese dated back to the late Medieval or early modern period and that survived almost unchanged until the 21st century. This might be a good argument to claim that traditional mountain practices are the result of adaptive processes and that they do not change much over time, but it's not true. Archive sources show that cheese production in this area had a marginal economic role, and other farming activities like chestnut production were more economically valuable. Cheese production remained essentially related to subsistence until very recently. And for this reason, it did not experience the modernization processes and transformed dairy practices in other areas of the Alps. In the last decades, the new interest for organic food fostered the success of small-scale cheese production, thus contributing to the survival of this strategy and of the associated landscape features. As pointed out above, health and safety regulations and market trends led to a recent and abrupt collapse of this economy. High-altitude cheese production had a critical role in shaping High Mountain landscapes. Historical ecology and the retrogressive analysis of historical maps confirmed that the high altitudes, as we see them today, have been influenced by the land use associated with upland dairy. Land management practices were comparable in the 18th, 19th, and 20th century, as long as the traditional drystone structures were in use. Local herders and farmers interviewed during our ethnological fieldwork confirmed that the use of the uplands was influenced by the spatially homogeneous pattern of these structures, which facilitated a more uniform exploitation of the territory. Local informants find that since the decline of traditional dairy activity and the conversion to non-dairy animals, the environment has started changing. The least accessible areas have been progressively abandoned and they are rewilding. The most accessible areas, instead, are overgrazed and over-manured. And these contributes to the depletion of pastures and to soil erosion. These are only the most immediate and visible consequences. But as we have seen before, more profound changes to the character of the local landscapes will be noticed only in the future. The balance between economy, ecology, and seasonal practices developed and maintained over the last five centuries is rapidly falling apart. This is an issue that needs to be urgently tackled by policymakers in the Ponte Galesi. This last example reinforces the argument that a thorough understanding of human-mountain interaction in the past is necessarily to plan for the future. Mountain archaeology is shedding new light on the origin and evolution of upland dairy production and on their consequences for mountain ecosystems. As pointed out before, this knowledge is not only useful for understanding the past. It is also crucial for informing future developments related to the promotion of sustainable dairy practices. The examples provided above confirm that archaeology has a potential to influence decision-making in the mountains. As a matter of fact, the time scale of mountain archaeology expands the temporal perspective of traditional landscape assessments and planning. However, improving our methods and collecting new data is not enough to become influential. We need to make ourselves more visible outside archaeology and promote more actively our research among policymakers. This, for me, is one of the key objectives for the near future. Archaeologists and paleocologists that work in the mountains are increasingly aware of that, and new collaborative projects are emerging. Soon, archaeology will be a key tile in the multicolored mosaic of mountain research. Thank you very much.