Due to their cultural and contemporary socio-economic significance as potential generators for sustainable local development, various national and international organizations and institutions are engaged in the research, protection, contemporary use, handling and development of archaeological landscapes, through the involvement of a number of scientific disciplines. Since the scientific turn, each of these disciplines ranging from social and natural sciences to fields of technological specialization have deepened in their own basic principles, objectives and methods to work in archaeological landscapes. The transfer of this development to higher education has been in the form of specialized courses within the track of each discipline.
Design for preserving while using archaeological landscapes requires an education background at the crossing of all the related fields of specialization, which is not easily achieved by graduate students of any single discipline individually. As a response to this, several graduate programmes in the European Higher Education Area have developed a multidisciplinary approach to archaeological landscapes, bringing together not only professors but also graduates of the involved disciplines. The ERASMUS IP Archaeological Landscapes (PreDU) aims to transnational sharing of experience and best practice between four established programmes in Austria, Belgium, Greece and Italy; and its transfer to the higher education institutes in Izmir and Turkey due to the richness of the area in term of archaeological landscapes.
The case selected for the course is one of those landscapes wherein remains from the ancient site of Erythrai overlap with modern village of Ildırı. As such, the programme would enable a practical testing of theoretical principles, objectives and methods developed on the basis of other examples through application in a new context that is culturally integral to Europe and yet administratively a non-EU/EU-candidate partner of the Council of Europe, which has important economic, social and legal implications affecting cultural landscapes. This will be among the innovative aspects of the project, also marking its European dimension.
