Archaeobotanical and Historical Insights on Some Steps of Forest Cover Disruption at Ustica Island (Sicily, Italy) from Prehistory Until Present day

This paper interprets the first archaeobotanical data to emerge from the island of Ustica (north-western Sicily, Italy). The excavation of the Neolithic site of Piano dei Cardoni (4600-4200 cal BC) and the Middle Bronze Age site of Faraglioni Village (1500-1250 cal BC), has made it possible to analyse plant macro-remains and compare them with data on local vegetation obtained from both historical literary sources and recent field surveys. The onset of agro-pastoral practices in the mid-5th millennium BC brought about significant changes to the local pristine plant communities. Indeed, the presence of holm oaks and pine trees in that period was recently detected for the first time. The evolution of the local vegetation following the first human settlement in the Neolithic has some crucial parallels with what happened following the recolonisation of the mid-eighteenth century. The massive presence of olive trees during the Middle Bronze Age suggests the deliberate introduction of this crop species on the island and attests to olives' paramount importance for the local economy at that time. The disappearance of some woody species shows that human occupation has had a powerful impact on the island's forest resources, which partially recovered during the repeated long phases of land abandonment.