Even in Europe, different people have very different associations with such environmental problems as "degradation". They bring home the extent to which a society or part thereof establishes its identity in direct interaction with its own history as well as with its natural environment. But they also confront us with the difficulties of "doing something" about environmental problems.

Based on the work undertaken in the trans-disciplinary ARCHAEOMEDES programme, van der Leeuw will discuss aspects of two case studies in Greece, which bring some of these points home.

The first of these concerns the Argolid, where intensive irrigated citrus cultivation has brought the water table down several hundred meters in forty years. The social dynamics behind this process show both how things have gone wrong, and why they could not have evolved otherwise. But the most important lesson is that social science research is essential if one wishes to opt for a non-technical "solution".

The second one concerns Northwestern Epirus, near the Albanian border. Here, again, social and environmental degradation have gone hand in hand. But why do so few of the projects intended to improve the situation actually work?

About Professor van der Leeuw
Prof. Sander van der Leeuw is Professor in Archeology at the Institut d´Art et d´Archéologie of the University of Paris.

Sander van der Leeuw has published widely on archaeological theory, historical ecology and European prehistory, including Archaeological approaches to the study of complexity (1981) and Time, process, and structured transformations in archaeology (1997).

He is External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute in the US, and has been coordinating the ARCHAEOMEDES Research Programme on the "Natural and Anthropogenic causes of Desertification and Land Degradation" under contract with DG XII of the European Union since 1992.