A. I. SAKS Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences 18 Dvortsovaya Emb., Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russia E-mail: saksa@mail.natm.ru Introduction The article deals with the geological and landscape history of the Karelian Isthmus and the influence of the geographical landscape on human settlement and economic activity in this territory bounded by the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga in the north-west of Russia. The difference between the Karelian Isthmus and the more northern regions of Finland and the neighboring regions located to the south is that due to the crushing of the earth's crust by the mass of glacial ice, it is still being lifted (straightened)here at a rate of 20 cm per century, which causes the earth's surface to tilt in a south-easterly direction and changes the landscape situation. Riverbeds and the outlines of the banks of reservoirs were constantly changing, which led to changes in the places of settlements and thereby gave grounds for establishing a geological chronology of monuments along the coastal terraces. The same processes formed the large-area fertile soils of the Vuoksa Valley. This has become one of the decisive factors in the development of the producing economy here. The proposed article is based both on the author's own research and on the results of the work of Finnish and Russian geologists, paleoecologists and archaeologists, including:the results of recent studies conducted in the 1990s with the participation of the author of interdisciplinary Russian-Finnish studies. Geological development The geological development of the region under consideration served as a determining factor in creating the prerequisites for human settlement of the Ladoga region and the Karelian Isthmus. Prehistoric man witnessed all the stages in the history of the Baltic Sea and Lake Ladoga in the Postglacial period, constantly adapting to the sometimes dramatic changes in the natural landscape. The modern relief of ... Read more