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H[rUMAN HABITATION PATTERNS are constrained by natural resources andprocesses. Any regional archaeological project must therefore first determine the primary resources provided by the natural setting, including the availability of fresh water, arable land, mineral deposits, building stones, and natural harbors, and, second, investigate the geological processes that may have distorted the original archaeological record, including erosion, deposition, tectonic movement, and coastal progradation and regression. Only when the quality and quantity of these factors are known will archaeological field projects be able to establish site size, function, and duration and reconstruct and interpret the historic interrelation between human habitation and landscape evolution.When the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) was conceived to investigate the history of settlement and land use in western Messenia (Peloponnesos, Greece), 1 it was decided that physical sciences would comprise a major component of the study. This article represents the preliminary report of the principal natural scientists who participated in the fieldwork for PRAP between 1991 and 1995.2 By employing an interdisciplinary team consisting of a geoarchaeologist (Eberhard Zangger), a soil scientist (Michael Timpson), a botanist and palynologist (Sergei Yazvenko), a geophysicist (Falko Kuhnke), and a hydroengineer (Jost Knauss), it was possible to reconstruct the environmental history of the landscape centered on the Palace of Nestor.3 Among the main results of this study are a continuous vegetation history for the past 7,000 years, the discovery of the earliest artificial port in Europe, and the discovery of a magnetic anomaly indicating a massive artificial structure northwest of the Palace of Nestor.
CHARACTERISTICS OF MESSENIAWestern Messenia lies hidden in a far corner of the Greek mainland and is difficult to reach from the eastern Peloponnesos by land because three mountain ridges obstruct 1 See Davis et al. 1993Davis et al. , 1994aDavis et al. , 1994bDavis et al. , 1995Davis et al. , and 1997 for a description of PRAP and for preliminary archaeological results. The full illustrated texts of preliminary reports for the 1993-1995 seasons are available on the WorldWideWeb at http://classics.lsa.umich.edu/PRAP.html, as is a complete gazetteer of all archaeological sites investigated by PRAP and a catalogue of representative artifacts from them. The physical scientific research was funded through PRAP by the Institute...
