DRAFT, not for cita0on. Please contact dmlekuz@gmail.com 1 Cultural landscape of a prehistoric hillfort: Tabor pri Vrabčah DIMITRIJ MLEKUŽ 1 SUMMARY The landscape of the Karst hillforts has been studied almost exclusively from the perspective of hillforts, treat- ing them as isolated points in an empty space. Airborne laser scanning survey revealed a very well preserved prehistoric landscape in the settlement niche of the Tabor pri Vrabčah hillfort. It is composed of settlement, large enclosure, brickwork fields, preserved as a network of low walls and terraces. Brickwork fields are crossed by walled track, which connect the settlement with the pastures and outfields. On the edges we can recognise some irregular fields and cairnfields. This example proves a vivid example that prehistoric landscapes were not empty spaces between settlements, but full of features and traces of daily activities. INTRODUCTION The landscape of hillforts (or castellieri) in Slovenian Karst have been studied almost exclu- sively from the perspective of hillforts, treating them as isolated points in an empty space. However, remote sensing techniques, especially airborne laser scanning (ALS, also known as LiDAR) revealed a host of different traces in a landscape, such as settlements, trackways, barrows, enclosures… The landscape around hillforts is full of traces of past human engage- ment with the landscape. One of the most surprising discoveries are traces of prehistoric land use and division. Those traces are material residues which enable us to understand relations between people and land in the Karst prehistory. The land plays central role in subsistence of pre-industrial societies, as growing of crops and raising animals was focus of daily life of most people and communities. Thus the way prehis- toric people organised landscape, accessed and regulated access to the land, should not be un- derstood using modern, Western or European understanding of ownership and tenure, neither should be seen through dichotomy between individual and collective ownership (Earle 2000, p. 8–14). If we want to understand the pattern of prehistoric cultural landscapes, land use and field sys- tems, their formation, development and their importance for prehistoric societies, we must approach them mainly as traces of the ways societies related to the natural world. Traces of 1 University of Ljubljana and Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Slovenia.