Rising in the Neogene hills of the Mallakaster, the rivers Seman and Vjosa have built up two large joint deltas on the Albanian Adriatic shore. This shoreline is characterized by a low sandy coast with bars and spits. Changes in the river courses and migration of the mouths of the deltas were rapid and numerous from the Holocene period until the beginning of drainage works in the 1950s. The drainage basins of the two rivers are developed in soft clastic rocks (flysch and molasse) in the proportion of 71Ð4 per cent for the Seman and 44Ð8 per cent for the Vjosa. Both rivers carry abundant sediment loads, amounting to 6Ð7 ð 10 6 tonnes per year for the Vjosa and 13Ð2 ð 10 6 tonnes per year for the Seman. This is the reason why the alluvial deposits of the Seman have built up two-thirds of the alluvial plain.The use of a SPOT image dated 25 May 1995 (HRV 3 081-268) enabled us to view the effects of coastal and fluvial dynamics, the role of neotectonics as well as the predominance of the plume of suspended sediment of the Seman river. Using this image, a geomorphological map was drawn, which identifies the palaeochannels of the Seman and the Vjosa. In order to date those palaeochannels we have made an archaeological inventory from oral and written published information. The location of the sites we studied was checked systematically in the field. The mediaeval and Ottoman archives kept in Tirana also provided substantial information, as well as the reconstitution of the evolution of the shoreline between 1870 and 1990, carried out using an inventory of topographic maps. This work allowed us to reconstitute the progression of the deltas of the Seman and the Vjosa since antiquity.We may then infer that from antiquity up to the Middle Ages, the deltas of the Seman and the Vjosa both progressed very moderately and in a comparable way. However, at the end of the 15th century the Seman underwent a major change in its course, through a southward migration of the river. The natural processes of alluviation and changes in the river courses seem to have been accelerated as agricultural exploitation of the Neogene hills that form most of the drainage basin of the Seman increased. This exploitation is linked with the massive exportation of cereal from the port of Skela e Pirgut, which started in the 14th century. It appears that the 20th century has been the period of the largest progression of the deltas during historical times. The speed of progression increased as early as the beginning of the century, as a result of the rapid growth of the rural population densities. Soil erosion from arable fields increased catchment sediment yields to promote rapid changes in the river courses. This resulted in abandonment of deltaic mouths, a phenomenon leading to a straightening of the coast. Thus to the south of the present mouth of the Seman the coast receded by 7 to 30 m per year between 1968 and 1990 as a result of the abandonment of a mouth.

Little was known until recently about regional patterns of early prehistoric occupation in Albania, making it difficult to situate the Albanian record within existing, general models of early prehistoric landuse. An intensive regional survey, the Mallakastra Regional Archaeological Project (MRAP), carried out in the Fier region of central Albania from 1998-2003, gathered widespread evidence for human occupation during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, from the Myzeqe Plain to the Mallakastra hills. The Pleistocene and early Holocene landscape of Fier differed considerably from the present landscape, and at times the Adriatic shoreline was much farther inland than it is now. As a consequence, Palaeolithic and Mesolithic foragers were able to exploit coastal-wetland and estuarine environments that have been buried only recently by alluvial sediment as a result of river avulsion and soil erosion. The landscape studied by MRAP is only a fragment of the total landscape once exploited by early humans in this part of the Balkans, whose home range may have included much of soutwest Albania and parts of northwest Greece. Our reconstruction of early prehistoric landuse in central Albania, based on collection and mapping of the locations of 1593 lithic artifacts from a 35 sq km area, indicates patterns of logistical foraging that span the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic and match those modeled in other Mediterranean countries, such as Greece.

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