The aim of the IS_LANDAS (Islamicate landscapes in southern Andalusia and western Sicily: patterns of change in settlements and rural communities between Late Antiquity and the Islamic age) project is to provide new comparative, interdisciplinary and multiscale perspectives on the changing patterns in settlement dynamics, human-environment interactions, land use and material culture in the Roman/Late Antique countryside during the Early Medieval Islamic period (8th/11th c. AD) in al-Andalus and Sicily. This project will address these questions in three different scales of observation: a regional macroscale (southern Al-Andalus; western Sicily) and a semi-micro territorial scale (the provinces of Málaga and Palermo); a micro-scale of two key-contexts for the transition from the Roman/Late Antique to Islamic periods. The creation of an extensive database and GIS-platform of reoccupied Roman/Late Antique sites and new rural settlements during the Early Medieval Islamic period, the application of GIS-based spatial and predictive analyses, field-surveys, excavations, pottery studies and archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological analyses will furnish a great amount on fresh and new data to add to the traditional debate on the transition between the Roman age and the complex formation of Islamicate societies. Furthermore, the ground-breaking comparative approach between two key regions – al-Andalus and Sicily – in this “other transition” from Antiquity to the Islamic period thus represents an innovative challenge for contextualizing regional phenomena in a wider Mediterranean scale.