Abstract

Based on the complementary approaches of social history and environmental and rural archaeology, this paper proposes a refl ection on the multiple dimensions of environmental resource management practices, interpreting them as actions (facts) characterized by the stratifi cation of social, juridical and technical practices. The idea is that keeping together these dimensions of actions permits the implementation of new perspectives on the processes that bind social change with landscape transformation. The selected case studies encompass different dynamics of marginalization – the abandonment of European mountains and the «enclosure» of shores –, which have led to these spaces being nowadays relegated to a condition of alterity (shores as private spaces; nature versus anthropic disturbance).