This introductory paper explores mountain landscapes as a subject of study within the archaeological disciplines. Mountains are part of the geography of human societies: places to transit and to inhabit, and sources of sustaining, resources and symbolic meanings. In that perspective, present mountain landscapes contain the material traces of the long-term human-environment interactions. The vision of archaeologists over mountain landscapes is in a radical process of change, due to the incorporation of archaeological fieldwork in multidisciplinary research programs carried out in mountain environments. Research assembled at the 10th IEMA Conference represent a significant sample of studies that are changing our perspective of mountain landscapes as archaeological documents, resulting in critical contributions for the understanding of the history of mountain environments, and creating new archaeological datasets to use in the interpretation of human societies.