Abstract The Indian subcontinent today houses about one-third of the global population and is one of the most vulnerable regions to future climate variability. This region has seen changes in civilizations, kingdoms and more recently political regimes, that were intricately linked to the changing environment over the mid–late Holocene. A comparative analysis of human–environment interaction within different regions at different time scales of the Quaternary is, however, lacking. In this paper we discuss the human–environment interactions taking case studies from two diverse time periods and geographically different regions from the Indian subcontinent. First, we review and analyse the role of environmental change in the evolution of Indus civilization on the northwestern Indian subcontinent during the mid–late Holocene and secondly, we discuss the role of both the anthropogenic activities and environmental change during the Anthropocene in shaping up the Bengal Delta. Overall, during the mid–late Holocene, Indus cultural transformations were driven by natural environmental changes, whereas the anthropogenic activities in the last few centuries have modified the Bengal deltaic landscape, which has intensified the impacts of natural disasters – in both cases a change in socio-political scenarios occurred. Such studies can be used as benchmarks to understand the future response of societies to environmental changes.

ABSTRACT The Bottaccione Gorge at Gubbio, in central Italy, has been an important source of information about Cretaceous and Paleogene Earth history. At the much younger end of the historical continuum, it is also important for understanding the early history of Gubbio itself, for which the only written, although somewhat ambiguous, evidence comes from the Tavole eugubine, the unique bronze tablets which are a kind of Rosetta Stone for the Umbrian language. The role of the Bottaccione Gorge is debated in the history of Gubbio. The road through the gorge, crossing the Monti di Gubbio, is an important element for explaining the location of the city. One of the first settlements (late Bronze Age) is recognized from archaeological evidence at the top of a morphological fault scarp on the slope of Monte Ingino. In the Iron Age, the city described in the Tavole eugubine developed, in which Okri (fortress), Tota (city), and three sacred gates are mentioned. The locations of Okri , Tota , and the gates are still under study. According to the most likely hypothesis, Tota would have developed in the plain, on the right bank of the Torrente Camignano, while the initial settlement would have been transformed into Okri , to which the sacred gates would belong. Another gate may have been placed at the entrance to the Bottaccione Gorge. When the Eugubini (the people of Gubbio) built the new, post-Roman Gubbio in the twelfth century, they still identified, as the most suitable place for a fortified city, the location above the scarp on the slope of Monte Ingino, and they built two new gates at its lateral ends. The city was likely equipped with a third gate that faced the Bottaccione Gorge. In the thirteenth century, the Bottaccione Aqueduct was built to bring water to the highest point of Gubbio. Thus, two waterways—one natural (Torrente Camignano) and the other artificial—still branch off from Bottaccione to reach Gubbio at two different points that determine the lowest and highest levels of the city.

ABSTRACT This paper is focused on the “paths of human history” in relation to the geological occurrence patterns of the following natural resources: stone, copper, tin, iron, gold, and coal. The abundant occurrence of flint in the Near East has influenced toolmaking and maybe the moment when early men discovered how to control fire. The scarcity of tin stimulated an early long distance trade during the Bronze Age. The abundant occurrence of iron, on the other hand, offered tools for everyday agriculture and “democratized” weaponry. The scarcity of gold, plus its durability, made it perfect for money, and therefore mining of gold strongly influenced economic history. The use of coal revolutionized the use of energy and industrialization. From making knives to controlling fire, from developing world trade to stimulating agriculture and war, from creating a global economy to increasing, as well as highlighting, the great differences between haves and have nots, from forming societies to destroying environments, the role of ores and their occurrences were essential.

Early vitreous materials include homogeneous glass, glassy faience, faience and glazed stones. These materials evolved slowly into more specialized substances such as enamels, engobes, lustres, or even modern metallic glass. The nature and properties of vitreous materials are summarized briefly, with an eye to the historical evolution of glass production in the Mediterranean world. Focus is on the evolution of European, Egyptian, and Near East materials. Notes on Chinese and Indian glass are reported for comparison. The most common techniques of mineralogical and chemical characterization of vitreous materials are described, highlighting the information derived for the purposes of archaeometric analysis and conservation.

Copper was the first metal to have been smelted (extracted from its ore) some seven thousands year ago in the ancient Near East. For most pre-industrial periods, the documentation of copper smelting chaine operatoire relies mainly on investigations by archaeometallurgists of the metallurgical waste recovered during archaeological excavations, namely the copper slags. Copper slags are mostly an assemblage of crystals of oxides (iron, manganese, etc. ), olivine (fayalite, etc. ) and/or pyroxenes embedded in a polymetallic more-or-less glassy matrix. The mineralogy of the slags is directly related to the initial charge and the working conditions prevailing in the pyrometallurgical reactor. This chapter aims to give an overview of how copper slag mineralogy is investigated and the type of information it yields in order to help our understanding of past metallurgies and societies.

The Romans, like the Egyptians and much more than the Greeks, used polychrome stones for decorative purposes in architectural elements, floor and wall facings and statuary. Throughout their Mediterranean provinces they systematically searched for and exploited a very large number of beautiful lithotypes, many of which they distributed to all corners of their empire. The most important of these stones were often re-used later in medieval-to-modern times; some of them are still offered on the market. They include granitoid rocks (granites, granodiorites/tonalities, gabbros, quartz-monzonites), a few lavas, many metamorphites (impure marbles, metabreccias and metandesites) and several sedimentary rocks (limestones, lumachellas, conglomerates, calcareous alabasters/travertines). The 40 most important and widespread of these lithotypes are considered here as regards their origin, the history of their use and their minero-petrographic characteristics, which can contribute to better knowledge of single species, to determination of the original quarries and to archaeometric solutions of several provenance problems.

Abstract The region of NW Russia connecting with the Baltic Sea presents a dynamic ecological system that was sensitive to environmental changes during the Holocene. Certain factors affected environmental changes in the region during the Holocene: deglaciation processes, that finally terminated about 9 cal ka BP; eustatic sea-level changes; and tectonic movements, which are basically considered in the region as isostatic uplift processes. Contextual remains of ancient human occupation sites can be the only evidence of surface stabilization in monotonous sediments, such as aquatic and subaquatic deposits. Prehistoric settlements also mark ancient shorelines. The latter is of great importance for studying the history of water oscillations and coastal-line displacements on the territory of NW Russia. The transgressive–regressive stages of the Baltic Sea (at c. 10.15 cal ka BP, the Ancylus transgression; at c. 7.6–7.0 cal ka BP, the Littorina transgression) have an impact on the positions of prehistorical sites. The complex investigations of the Stone Age archaeological settlements on the Karelian Isthmus and in the Dvina–Lovat’ basin, and their altitudes below sea level, allowed us to reconstruct palaeoenvironmental changes during the Holocene, the chronology of cultural–historical processes and the adaptation strategy of ancient people to environmental conditions in this territory.