 much to the organizers of this session for giving me the possibility to show something of my research. I am not an archaeologist, but I work with archaeologists since the 19th, so it's a lot of time, and I feel like an archaeologist of the landscape. But I am a biologist, so my perspective on showing you and discussing about the Mediterranean cultural landscape is a biological perspective. The keywords of my presentation are palinology, Mediterranean, archaeological site, and cultural landscape. But there will be two main parts. The first part is a methodological part. Why palinology to study cultural landscape? And the second part is an example of a palinology applied to archaeological sites in Sicily with special focus on San Vincenzo Stromboli. The development of cultural landscapes can be studied by palinology. The evolution of a cultural landscape over time is seen as an adaptive response to climate change and local environmental and sociocultural variables. In a long-term perspective, both the natural and the social science approaches can be studied through the pollen analysis. But why? Because if we observe the concepts included in the idea of cultural landscapes, we find that there are ecological, formal, and cognitive concepts. And this is a definition following the Moorl and Byles-Smith free concept that can identify an ecological concept that means a landscape produced by cumulative effects of human activities. The formal concept is a landscape produced by a particular culture. And the cognitive concept includes intangible links between humans and their territories. And with Botany we can study also these aspects through palethnobotany and ethnobotany. But palinology is the science that uses pollen to measure ecological phenomena and therefore is among the best biological approaches to investigate the relationships between people and the environment in the past. Pollen is produced by flowering plants and spread thanks to the transport by wind and by animals, including humans into the animals. But when we study pollen stratigraphy from archaeological sites, we must take in mind that we need an archaeological approach and an archaeological interpretation. So to study pollen from archaeological sites needs a different sampling approach and interpretation approach with respect to sediment cores. Therefore we have different sites and different contexts in palinology. We can study both, but the effects of the human activities on plants, that is, that palinologists can see, are expected to be more evident in the archaeological sites rather than in the off sites. The study of archaeological sites often gives a direct evidence of the local land use and of plant exploitation and can help inferences on climate and human impact in the region when it is compared with off site records. So we have off sites, we mean lakes, pitboxes, small miles and we have on site, we specifically think to archaeological sites. It is not rare to have pollen analysis from archaeological sites. From the database brain, which is online, you can check the number and typology of archaeobotanical analysis. We know currently that there are more than 200 archaeological sites in Italy with pollen analysis. Most palinological research is demonstrating that the Bronze Age has probably had the most dramatic impact on the landscape and that there is a good correspondence between the distribution of archaeological sites and the paleo-ecological data that emerged from, that are emerging from the off sites. So the influence of humans on the environment has a long history in all our territory. Moving to Sicily, the database brain includes plant remains from 19 archaeological sites and six of them performed results from pollen analysis. In Modena and my lab studied, for example, pollen samples from filosofiana and from Villa del Casale as Roman periods and from the medieval site of Piazza Armerina. Moreover, we studied also pollen from the Roman Mozia from the Greek and Roman theater of Taormina and now we have just started to study Morgantina. Just this summer we have taken samples. Everywhere palinology has been able to outline the role of human activities like site building, cultivation and pastoralism as key agents of shaping the Mediterranean landscape. Considering the topic of this session, I decided to focus as case study example on San Vincenzo in Stromboli, which is a Bronze Age site. We are studying since the 2010 in cooperation with Sara Tiziana Levy and her team. San Vincenzo in Stromboli is the northernmost island in the Olean Archipelago in the southern Teurinian Sea and is in a strategic position for controlling the maritime routes, in particular the Messina Strait. The excavation at San Vincenzo Stromboli directed since 2009 by Sara Tiziana Levy in collaboration with the superintendent of the Messina has revealed a wide early middle Bronze Age village with several oval stone built huts inside the network of stone fences and terraces. We studied samples from these cultural liars but also from our occupation liars because the occupation of the site continued into historical times with evidence of burials, buildings and abundant pottery from the classical period to the present. As for the Archibotanical data, we know that we have macro remains especially the study of the University of Salento and the colleague Fiorentino from the island of Filiicudi and Salina but most data come from macro remains. In Stromboli we have the first evidence from Poland from these archaeological sites. A strategy of open-air excavation and trenches has revealed well preserved archaeological deposits investigated with an interdisciplinary focus especially in regards to the integration of volcanological research. So Archibotanical analysis focused on Bronze Age samples but we selected especially samples that were studied also for our proxy. A total of about 90 Poland samples were collected during seven archaeological campaigns and about 60 samples for Carpo-logical analysis were taken but we have not find any macro remains so it was not possible for us to integrate data even if it is a work style we have and it is the optimum to work by putting together results from microscopic and macroscopical plant evidence. So in general when we collect Poland samples we have to take in mind that not all contacts are suitable to find Poland so we must avoid fireplaces, oxidated liars if we have floors or something and no Poland can be found and in general we can have also a bad state of preservation of these pollen grains so we have to search for the better for the best rich organic segments but we can find also bad pollen in other samples. In general it is also important to concentrate the pollen because it is important to use a pollen extraction by concentration by concentrate. So it is very important to use a flotation of pollen and it sounds like a flotation of macro remains but it is another thing but pollen can float and in this way we can concentrate it in archaeological sites. So looking at some results from San Vincenzo Stromboli I put in the bottom here a classical pollen diagram the top layers of the two top layers here are the recent spectra modern spectra and the other server from the Bronze Age and at the top to to pie diagram to show the main flora composition of this diagram. So in in general pollen spectra show a low forest cover and the prevalence of herbs of the type ciperacea, poacea and urtica that all together mean a dominance of wet meadows or treeless vegetation with many ruderal and anthropic wild plants near the houses for example. Woods included the oaks, juniper and olea indicating a thermo mediterranean forest and olea was about three percent during the Bronze Age which is a significant percentage it means that olive trees were close to the site. Wet environments are well represented including salix and aquatic plants suggesting that freshwater was even more available in the past than today in this island. Interestingly serial pollen is rare and only five grains of ordeum time that include barley were found in two different areas of the site. This means that possibly the plants were grown there but no large fields we cannot imagine a large fields. Moving to two key type of records Cicorye and Vitis are very interesting because Cicorye are usually indicator of pasture lands and means that people relied on pasture but in the case of Stromboli we have no so high evidence by Cicorye rather than other breeding plants like Fabace or plants used also for fodder and also this is a coprophilus dung fungus that is the evidence of breeding in the area. About Vitis the problem of pollen or Vitis is quite strange. We focused on the absence of this pollen because we know that the acobotanical evidence of the oldest domesticated Vitis is a test that in the Olian island with grape seeds from the village of Filoblaccio and Filicudi and in the village of Portella in Salina. Both islands have important links with the JN area but in the case of Stromboli we cannot demonstrate that the living plants were growing there because pollen is absent. Only to show you that we studied in a special way pollen of Vitis also in the Roman times because it was known that Villa del Casale was with a lot of mosaics reporting the image of Vitis but also in that case the few records were only indicators of decoration plants. So my time is finished thank you for your attention.