Special Issue "Archaeology of Remote Lands"

Dear Colleagues,

Remoteness is the state of being distant from something else or the lack of connection with or relationship to the central cores. Lands (that have been) considered distant, marginal, remote, inaccessible, unexplored, or faraway in geographical terms (along time) have not often been fore-fronted in archaeological studies. The driest deserts, the highest mountains, the most impenetrable jungles, the most isolated islands, the freezing polar lands, or the edges of maps have often been underexplored by archaeologists. Moreover, Archaeological studies of those sorts of lands have become marginal in a disciplinary sense, receiving uneven attention due to their allegedly marginal role in Big History. Indeed, global processes have been mainly explained from the "centers", while remote lands were not prominent when discussing the expansion of states and empires, global commerce, the adoption of technological innovations, or the global fluctuations of the world population. Therefore, remote or marginal lands became voids, exceptions to general trends, and refuge areas for neglected cultural manifestations inherited from an (elsewhere overcame) past. However, landscape archaeology fore-front approaches, frameworks, and methods have begun to highlight the relevance of studying remote lands for understanding large-scale processes in-depth. Thus, this Special Issue intends to emphasize how recent landscape archaeological projects in remote lands, ranging from prehistoric times to the current era, are changing the ways we (archaeologists) can tackle global themes for discussing Big History relying upon remote lands around the world.

This Special Issue aims to examine myriad approaches of landscape archaeology to the significance of remote lands, defined in both geographical and disciplinary terms, to the understanding of large-scale processes in human history. This general aim perfectly entangles with some of the general editorial scopes established by Land, such as the comprehensive understanding of land as a global system in social and ecological terms. 

We are interested in contributions that study remote lands to understand historical (cultural, social, economic) processes through either empirical research or conceptual/theoretical works, examining any key processes, including but not limited to the following:

• Reviewing center–periphery models in Archaeology to explain historical processes in remote lands;
• Looking at Big History from remote lands or marginal areas;
• The arrival of global migrations and human expansions to remote areas around the globe;
• Socio-environmental impacts of global revolutions (from Prehistory to current era) on remote lands;
• Surviving at the margins: strategies for social and biological reproduction in remote areas;
• History of Archaeology in remote lands;
• Technological and methodological innovations in Landscape Archaeology to fill the voids in the History of remote lands.

Dr. David González-Álvarez
Dr. Maria Ximena Senatore
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• landscape archaeology
• mountain archaeology
• polar archaeology
• archaeology in arid environments
• wetlands archaeology
• global archaeology
• big history