The Classical lands of the Mediterranean present the thoughtful observer with the paradox of the homelands of great early civilizations in landscapes now characterized by limited and discontinuous arable soils, bare rocky hillsides, and silted harbors. Already in late Classical times writers speculated about the destruction of formerly richer landscapes by abusive land-use practices. Early environmentalists used the Mediterranean case as a moral lesson, threatening similar impoverishment to heedless peoples elsewhere (e.g., Marsh 1965). This view of things is necessarily based on the assumption that the damage had been done during classical times and that later populations simply endured the burden of their poor inheritance, which doomed them to economic marginality in the modern world.

By the decade of the 1960s, informed observers had noticed that the massive alluvial deposits in circum-Mediterranean valleys contained Roman and younger sherds, and that in some instances they buried Classical and Byzantine sites (e.g., Judson 1963). These observations particularly impressed Claudio Vita-Finzi, who inspected valley fills around the Mediterranean and published in 1969 a monograph on his investigations.

Vita-Finzi observed two major episodes of Mediterranean valley fills, which he called the “Older” and “Younger” Fills. The older and more massive was very rocky in places, was typically a deep red color, and had been deeply incised by stream-cutting before the deposition of the Younger Fill that was “nested” within it.