Intensification of terrace agriculture on the Northern Apennines during the Medieval Climate Anomaly

Recent environmental studies and policies have recommended maintaining archaeological landscape features such as intercropping, agroforestry and cross-slope barriers (e.g. hedgerows, stone walls, earth banks) for their potential benefits to ecosystems. This study focuses on a portion of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines coinciding with the municipality of Vetto d'Enza (commonly referred as Vetto), located on the right bank of the Enza River in the Man and the Biosphere UNESCO reserve (Emilia-Romagna region, Northern Italy). The main characteristics of this historic rural landscape trace their origin back to the Middle Ages at the period of the Great Countess Matilda of Canossa (10-11th century CE) and the area’s land management system appears to have remained largely unaltered until the end of the 19th-century CE. Among the most distinctive characteristics of this historic landscape are relicts of agroforestry practices (known as ‘alberata emiliana’) and well-preserved stone walls and earth banks that have been used extensively between steeply-sloping fields to delimit tenurial boundaries and to face agricultural terraces. Optically stimulated luminescence profiling and dating (OSL-PD) has been applied to date the sediments associated with earth banks, stone walls and agricultural terraces. The results provide secure construction dates during the Medieval Climate Anomaly - (MCA). This period (ca. 900–1350 CE) is arguably one of the most crucial moments of recent climate change that impacted societies, particularly in Europe. Above average temperatures allowed high-elevation settlements to persist throughout the MCA, though social trends played a large role in the conversion of uplands into an agro-pastoral landscape. These processes are particularly evident on the Apennine mountains, where mediaeval deforestation coincided with intensification of agriculture associated with development of monastic estates that exploited increasingly larger land holdings as well as new settlement patterns in higher-elevation defensible locations.