Five Thousands Years of Land Use and Abuse in the Southern Argolid, Greece

O REECE is, in the main, a land of dry and barren mountains, poor in fertile, wellk3watered soil. Still, ancient authors refer repeatedly to the wooded hills and rich bottomlands of a remote past. Whether the disappearance of this lush landscape, if indeed it ever existed, was due to natural or to human causes has been debated with passion since Antiquity. Environmentalists of a pessimistic bent like to cite the eastern Mediterranean as a particularly horrifying example of what callous human disregard for the environment can bring about, while others have attributed the stripping of soil from the mountains to the severe climate of the Pleistocene.