Abstract CLEMENS, acronym for Corpus Latinorum Et Mediaevalium Naturae Scriptorum , is a new electronic archive of excerpta reporting environment-related data contained in the literary and epigraphic sources of classical Roman and Medieval age. The aim is to fill a gap in information about environmental disruptions or memorabilia that occurred in ancient times within the Mediterranean basin, and to verify whether any useful information has eluded our knowledge. One of the main purposes of the systematic gathering and cataloguing carried out by CLEMENS is to become an extensive easy-to-search tool, offering the scientific community complete annotated documentation of what is available inside ancient sources about the natural environment in the Mediterranean. This information, currently dispersed in a variety of publications that may be difficult to access, has often proven essential for hazard assessment in several areas of the former Roman empire. It also contributes significantly to the understanding of changes caused by environmental events over the centuries, and of their incidence on natural habitats and on cultural heritage. The analysis of such interconnections may lead to a much improved understanding of either natural environment, hazards and cultural setting, as shown by interdisciplinary investigations merging together science, archaeology and history or even myth. Considering the vast amount of documentation, the work is still far from completion. However, the encouraging preliminary results will soon be available on the web.

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Mesoscale fault slip data were gathered in rocks ranging in age between Cretaceous and Quaternary to evaluate the evolution of regional stress tensor orientations in the San Luis Obispo-Santa Maria area of coastal central California. We applied the numerical inversion method of Carey and Brunier (1974) for fault slip data to obtain a mean direction of the maximum principal stress (σ 1 ) trending 202°, 5° for the late Pliocene-Quaternary. Similar orientations were determined from data of older units. In many late Pliocene-Quaternary sediments, conjugate sets of reverse faults are present, and based on the Anderson (1951) model of faulting, yield the same northeast-southwest-oriented axis of maximum compression. The predominant joint sets strike 030° and 110°, almost parallel and othogonal to large-scale fold axes of the area. The northeast σ 1 agrees with the present regional stress tensor determined from focal mechanisms, and indicates that since the late Pliocene the deformation of this area was by northeast-oriented crustal shortening. The slip indicators related to this tensor appear to overprint and often mask most of the indicators related to earlier stress regimes.