Between 19 and 21 April 2023, the second European Assembly of Archaeology of the Americas will be held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The meeting is promoted by the EAA4Am Community, the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (INCIPIT-CSIC), and the Centre for Andean Studies of the University of Warsaw.The program is here.An introduction to American landscapes:Landscapes in the Americas are a palimpsest of forms and meanings. Additionally, they have the particularity of often being composed of antagonistic elements, as they are the products of a history of radical and sometimes violent transformations. At the global level, European colonisation is responsible for one of the most profound and visible of these transformations, not only in terms of settlement patterns, environment, and material culture, but also in cosmological terms. Undoubtedly, the imposition of the naturalistic ontology brought about some of the most profound and long-lasting changes: by expelling non-humans into the realm of nature, the dualistic philosophy often oversimplified the social life of non-modern worlds and authorised the capitalist exploitation of the extreme West.Despite territorial rearrangements, resource extraction and extirpations of idolatries, American landscapes often retain a rich material and biological memory of their pre-modern history, often hundreds or thousands of years deep. Of course, they also preserve numerous more recent traces of the modern history of Creole republics, nation-states, and indigenous societies right up to the present day.Likewise, American historical processes (both global and local) have left traces everywhere, forming an immense field of archaeological research. Unlike in many other parts of the world, in many American regions, these traces can be found right there at our feet, visible to everyone. When the traces are more difficult to ascertain (concealed by the forest, for example), remote sensing can make them visible with increasingly realistic images. For this reason, the potential for producing knowledge about forgotten and/or hidden pasts is often as great as the management and interpretation of these omnipresent historical legacies in the present can be problematic.In this context, landscape archaeology becomes multifaceted. Both polysemic and integrative, the idea of landscape continues to raise many research questions, often creating transdisciplinary scientific fields. Proof of this is the convening of our scientific meeting on American landscapes. The meeting will bring together researchers from different horizons and with diverse interests, although all related to the fundamental diversity in the ways of inhabiting the Earth. On this occasion, indigenous cosmologies, ecology, modernity, and heritage policies were the topics most addressed in the communication proposals of the participants. Thus, these points will form the four central poles of the colloquium.The session on indigenous cosmologies will demonstrate why landscape archaeology is a fundamental tool for producing knowledge about the cultural diversity of conceptualisation and representation of the world developed in the Americas over the centuries. It will also reflect on the ontological characteristics of Amerindian and indigenous societies in terms of relations between humans and non-humans, and on the agency of entities such as mountains, skies, and bodies of water in non-modern worlds. Analyses of landscapes and monuments can illustrate how more or less ancient cultures constructed places and territories according to cosmological principles. Beyond the presentation of case studies, the session will also offer the opportunity to discuss the potential of landscape archaeology to produce information on the meaning of landscapes. We will ask to what extent the analysis of materiality allows us not only to identify the forms and devices of meaning production (how did they mean?), but also on the meanings themselves (what did they mean?) which are usually informed by ethnohistorical and/or ethnographic data.The heritage session will provide an opportunity to reflect on the effects of global and national cultural and heritage policies on the meanings and uses of the past (and the management of its archaeological materialities) in the American countries. Despite having been forerunners in terms of the rights of Nature (as in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia), American countries generally lack heritage and environmental regulations based on values that are the fruit of endogenous cultural dynamics. While it is true that certain global heritage labels, such as the UNESCO cultural landscape, make it possible to identify and register landscapes according to indigenous criteria, they do not prevent the conflicts produced by the perverse effects of heritagization (the essentialisation and commodification of cultures, touristification of territories, naturalisation and reification of landscapes, etc.). Along these lines, this session will provide a space for discussion on the practical and conceptual paradoxes of current policies for the recording and conservation of the heritage of American landscapes.The session on ecology will highlight how landscapes are intimately related to dynamic interactions between anthropogenic and bioclimatic agents. It will examine historical processes of these ecological interactions (more or less symmetrical) as perceived through changes in the demography and distribution of plants and animals and the materiality of anthropic practices of management and spatial planning of the environment. The presentation of case studies combining archaeology and palaeoecology from the Amazon and the Andes will highlight the interdependent relationships between humans and non-humans, biotic and abiotic agents, and the effects (intentional and unintentional) of anthropogenic practices on biodiversity, and will do so at different temporal scales and interconnected geographic contexts. The session will also discuss the potential of archaeological research to assess current land use and highlight lessons from the past for socio-ecological sustainability. It will also reflect on the resilience of current indigenous peoples and traditional populations.Finally, the session on Landscapes of Modernity will look at the relationships between historical processes in the Americas since European expansion, the development of modern philosophy and its effects on the shaping of the Western world. Talks will highlight the potential of archaeology to generate alternative views by integrating diverse sources of evidence (whether material, written or oral) on the transformations of societies and landscapes during colonial and later historical conjunctures. Case studies will connect the materiality of local microhistories with modern global processes, such as colonial slavery, industrial capitalist extractivism and contemporary political dictatorship. Through these, the session will allow us to discuss not only the potential of archaeology to produce specific scientific information on modern and contemporary histories, but also the role of the ruins of Modernity in our territories and landscapes.