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The Mani Peninsula is home to hundreds of Orthodox Christian churches that were built within the last millennium. As in other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean countryside, the topological relationship between churches and settlements is a critical factor in understanding the significance of the sacred landscape. Many churches are situated in the central part of a village or on its very edge, but others – what are referred to as “outlying churches” or exokklisia – are built at great distances away. In this paper, we make the first attempt to assess the spatial relationship between the spaces where people worshipped (the churches) and the spaces where they lived (the settlements) at a regional scale, focused specifically on the Middle Byzantine period and later (mid-9th century CE to the present day). Comparing these patterns across the Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern periods allows us to frame Mani’s sacred infrastructure within a changing, diachronic perspective. The results point to a change in the topological relationship between church and settlement that is best described as the “nucleation of the sacred landscape.”

Multi-sensor prospecting is a fast-emerging paradigm in archaeological geophysics. Given suitable ground conditions for navigation, sensor arrays drastically increase efficiency in data collection. In particular, geomagnetic prospecting benefits from this development. Despite these advancements, data processing still lacks a best-practice approach. Conventional processing methods developed for gridded data has been challenged by sensor arrays "roaming" in the landscape. In realization of the issue, the Innovative Geophysical Approaches for the Study of Early Agricultural Villages of Neolithic Thessaly (IGEAN) Project explored various innovative techniques for the betterment of the multi-sensor geomagnetic data processing. As a result, a modular pipeline is produced with minimal user intervention. In addition to standard steps, such as data clipping, various other algorithms have been introduced. This pipeline is tested over 20 Neolithic settlements in Thessaly, Greece, three of which are presented here in detail. The proposed workflow provides drastic improvements over raw data. As a result of these improvements, the IGEAN project revealed astonishing details on architectural elements, settlement enclosures, and paleolandscapes, changing completely the existing perspective of the Neolithic habitation in Thessaly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]