The Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia Project: New Data and Method from the Insular Mediterranean Elizabeth A. Murphy a , Thomas P. Leppard a , Andrea Roppa b , Emanuele Madrigali c , and Carmen Esposito d a Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL; b Università degli Studi di Padova, Padua, Italy; c Missione Archeologica Pani Loriga; d Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK ABSTRACT Sardinia has played a vital integrative role in the Holocene Mediterranean, most notably—although not only—as a key locus in emergent maritime “Mediterraneanization” and as an object of contestation among mainland polities over the last three millennia. Yet, despite the florescence of Mediterranean survey archaeology, this standard method has only been sparsely employed in Sardinia, with a pronounced focus on large, urban, coastal sites. Accordingly, we have little understanding of the ebb and flow of human settlement in the Sardinian interior. This represents a significant lacuna in the study of Mediterranean archaeology and history. Here, we report data from the first two seasons of the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project, a multidisciplinary project designed to correct this bias and to investigate how episodic integration into—but also disintegration from—larger economic and political structures drove sociocultural and socioeconomic change in southwestern Sardinia over the Mid-Late Holocene. KEYWORDS landscape archaeology; Sardinia; pedestrian survey; geospatial analysis; settlement patterns; Mediterranean dynamics Introduction Systematic and diachronic survey archaeology in the Mediter- ranean has, since the 1970s, achieved near ubiquity as a stan- dard method with which to elucidate patterning and dynamics in the human occupation of landscapes over the very long term (Alcock and Cherry 2004; Barker and Mattingly 1999–2001; Galaty 2005; Knodell and Leppard 2018). The application of intensive pedestrian survey and related methodologies on Sardinia has been patchy, however, tending to focus on some areas of this large island and some periods of human activity to the exclusion of others (van Dommelen and Finocchi 2008). This is unfortunate, consid- ering the unparalleled capacity of pedestrian survey to reveal dimensions of human behavior intrinsically inaccessible via site-based approaches, a capacity fully illustrated by the exemplary if unevenly distributed survey archaeology that has been undertaken on the island (Annis, van Dommelen, and van de Velde 1995, 1997; Botto, Melis, and Rendeli 2000, 2003; Dyson and Rowland 1992; Finocchi 2005, 2007; van de Velde 2001; van Dommelen 1998, 2003). It is all the more unfortunate considering that pressing research issues in Sardinian and central Mediterranean archaeology demand a landscape oriented approach by virtue of their spatial extent: the establishment and integration of first farming settlement; the emergence of Late Bronze Age “elite” society; entanglement within Early Iron Age long distance networks of trade (but also power); and the relentlessly cyclical incor- poration of the island into and its dislocation from mainland imperial polities (Carthage to Spain) are all problematics that can only be understood from the perspective of diachronic study of the Sardinian landscape. We report here data derived from the 2017 and 2018 sea- sons of the Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project, a project established in part in an attempt to redress this situation. We contextualize the aims of the pro- ject within the broader research environment, discuss field methods employed (primarily surface survey complemented by geospatial analysis), and present initial results. Although any interpretation of these data is as yet preliminary and con- tingent upon further field and laboratory work in coming sea- sons, we are nonetheless optimistic that pedestrian survey in this part of Sardinia clearly has the potential to simul- taneously bolster and challenge patterns of settlement and landscape exploitation seen elsewhere in the island. Research Context Survey archaeology and the Sardinian landscape Sardinia, lying at the heart of the central Mediterranean, is exemplary of its broader context. In Braudel’s(1972) terms, Sardinia is a quintessentially Mediterranean landscape: its steep coasts oriented outwards to facing continental shore- lines (to Corsica at one extreme, and to North Africa at the other), its interior—except for the Campidano—mostly rugged and dissected, internally focused and traditionally reli- ant on small-scale mixed agriculture and pastoralism. In Hor- den and Purcell’s(2000) conception, Sardinia anticipates larger Mediterranean dynamics, a broken up and intrinsically heterogeneous landscape that processes of cabotage and con- nectivity over greater distances have nonetheless knit together. In that regard, regional or survey archaeology undertaken on the island has immense promise, to the extent that any landscape can be typical or illustrative of broader Mediterranean human ecology. That said, Sardinia has played, at times, an atypical role. Its political development in the 2nd millennium B.C. is certainly relatively unusual, with the specificities of the nuragic landscape—characterized © Trustees of Boston University 2019 CONTACT Elizabeth A. Murphy eamurphy@fsu.edu Department of Classics, Florida State University, 205A Dodd Hall, 641 University Way, Tallahassee, FL 32306. JOURNAL OF FIELD ARCHAEOLOGY 2019, VOL. 44, NO. 6, 367–382 https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2019.1625247