Long-Term Settlement Dynamics and Land Use on the Mani peninsula of Southern Greece

This session presents the results of recent multidisciplinary research conducted in the Mani Peninsula in southern Lakonia, Greece. The papers in this forum discuss the evolution of settlement and land use on the peninsula during the later Holocene, focusing on case studies from the Neolithic through the Ottoman periods, ca. 6,000 BCE – 1900 CE. Much of the research presented in this session is related to investigations conducted under the auspices of The Diros Project, which was established by a team of international researchers in 2010 to catalog and publish the Neolithic material from ongoing excavations in Alepotrypa Cave and to survey the surrounding Diros Bay in an attempt to place the cave site into a regional context. Several subsequent projects have been undertaken as offshoots of the work in Diros Bay, the results of which contribute to the overall understanding of settlement dynamics in the broader region.