This volume is derived from an SEPM international workshop entitled Multidisciplinary Approach to Cyclostratigraphy, organized by the editors in May 2001 and held in Sorrento (Naples, Italy). In the Introduction we offer a brief history of how concepts of orbital cyclicity and its effects on the Earth evolved, an appraisal of the present state of research, and an overview of the papers in this volume. The main body of the volume consists of the contributed studies. These include a paper on conceptual and pragmatic approaches to stratification cycles by one of the pioneers of cyclostratigraphy, Walther Schwarzacher, who, in the 1940s, discovered the hierarchical expression of orbital cycles in rocks. The other contributions are specific studies of cyclic sequences, extending from the Quaternary back to the Triassic, covering the range from continental deposits to the deep sea, and employing a wide variety of techniques for extracting and processing the information.