Agricultural terraces provide farmers in hilly landscapes with effective ways to increase the area available for crops. They mitigate the risks of soil erosion and promote crop productivity by slowing surface water runoff and retaining moisture. As in other parts of the world, terraces have been constructed and used in the Mediterranean for millennia. The availability of terraced agriculture had important socio-economic, ecological, and environmental implications for past societies. However, the chronology of construction, use, and abandonment of terraces in different regions remains uncertain. A more robust set of chronological data will allow better assessment of whether terrace agriculture was a resilient strategy in the face of past economic or ecological instability and, in turn, inform how terraces could be used to address future agricultural and environmental challenges. In this paper, we review the application of luminescence dating to terrace sediments, the key challenges involved, and the currently published data which include over 250 luminescence ages. We also discuss the use of a multidisciplinary approach involving other geoarchaeological tools (e.g., use of GIS analyses, field-based luminescence readers, and micromorphology) to enhance the ways that past terrace systems can be understood. Terrace systems are inextricably linked to sustainable land use across the Mediterranean. Luminescence dating methods, therefore, have a crucial role to play in understanding the complexities of past and future landscape change.

This article presents an interdisciplinary programme for research on historic landscapes that has emerged since 2020 in the framework of the project Terraces as Sustainable Agricultural Environments (‘TerraSAgE’). While the methodology has been tested in specific Mediterranean case studies, it is also applicable in other locations and regions. Our integrated approach provides new insights into the development of terraced agrarian landscapes and the changing dynamics in land management. It can provide knowledge of the extent to which past change has influenced present‐day landscapes and has implications for the development of sustainable landscape practices. The research framework proposed here has been tested through case studies in different landscape types across southern Europe, including small‐scale mixed farming landscapes of the Aegean islands (Naxos, Greece); terraces for vines and olives (Pelješac, Croatia); a landscape of dairy production (northern Apennines, Italy), which was until quite recently agroforestry; modern cereal cultivation (around Els Prats de Rei, Catalonia, Spain); upland irrigated landscapes on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada (Andalucia, Spain) and mixed farming in a wooded Atlantic environment (Galicia, Spain).

This study employs Optically Stimulated Luminescence Profiling and Dating (OSL-PD) to address the challenge of synchronizing social changes with natural events, a significant limitation in existing studies on the resilience and vulnerability of pre-modern societies to ecological stress. By uncovering the construction dates of terrace farming systems in the northern Apennines region, the research reveals a distinct temporal framework, indicating that the establishment of agricultural terraces predominantly occurred during the 11th to 13th centuries CE. This crucial time frame aligns directly with complex socio-economic factors, including the encastellation process, alongside the climatic shifts characterising the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Isotopic fractionation of the Total Organic Carbon confirms that different agricultural choices were made in coincidence with the establishment of terrace farming. The resultant historical rural landscape underwent continuous enhancements in the centuries that followed. Notably, the main phases of (re)construction correspond to the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, offering new insights into the historical interactions between human activities and the environment during the Late Holocene in the area.