On a rocky hillside in an agricultural village halfway between Rome and Naples, an ancient form of building is being revived. Dry stone masonry—a technique dating back thousands of years—is being used to help restore the rocky terraces that have enabled agricultural activity in communities across Italy. How those structures are being rebuilt hints at a new, more sustainable approach to architecture and construction.

The terraces are the focus of architect Nicolás Delgado Álcega, a recent graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Part of his thesis involved working in collaboration with an agricultural collective in the rural community of Vallecorsa to restore its terraces to allow cultivation. Terracing this land turns rocky hillside into arable soil.

“It’s a very old settlement, it’s pre-Roman. They had terraced about 2,000 hectares of land and really built soils and made arable land where there wasn’t any in order to sustain the growth of the population. It established a whole new environmental balance,” Delgado Álcega says.

But like many parts of rural Italy, the region’s economy has shifted and the population has shrunk. The terraces have been left to crumble. Delgado Álcega and his partner, Ginevra D’Agostino, expanded on his thesis work to help the agricultural collective in Vallecorsa to rebuild the terraces. Instead of bringing in new material or hiring contractors, the architects worked directly with the collective’s members to use existing rocky material from crumbling terraces and the landscape to recreate the dry stone masonry approach that was originally used to build the terraces. By creating these spaces for cultivation, farmers are able to use their land more productively, carving a path for environmentally and economically sustainable agriculture.

Keep reading on Fast Company

Check out more news below: