42 research outputs found

    European ancient settlements - A guide to their composition and morphology based on soil micromorphology and associated geoarchaeological techniques; introducing the contrasting sites of Chalcolithic Bordus, ani-Popina, Borcea River, Romania and Viking Age Heimdaljordet, Vestfold, Norway

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    Specific soil micromorphological, broader geoarchaeological and environmental archaeology signatures of settlement activities and land use have been identified from numerous case studies across Europe – from Romania to western Norway. In order to demonstrate how such investigations contribute to our understanding of settlement morphology and its wider landscape, an improved way of organising site-specific information or guide was created (Macphail and Goldberg, in press). Activities and land use are divided into ‘Within Settlement’, ‘Peripheral to Settlement’ and ‘The Settlement's Wider Landscape’. Major themes identified are: Constructions (and materials), Trackways and paths (and other communication/transport-associated features), Animal Management, Water Management, Waste Disposal (1: middening; 2: human waste), Specialist Domestic and Industrial Activities and Funerary Practices. In the case of trackway deposits, their characterisation aids the identification of intensely occupied areas compared to rural communications, although changing land use within urban areas has also produced ‘rural signatures’ (e.g. as associated with animal management), for example in Late Roman cities. Specialist activities such as fish and crop processing or working with lead and other metals, in-field and within-wall manuring, stabling and domestic occupation floor-use evidence, and identification of different funerary practice – cremations, boat graves and other inhumations, and excarnation features – and peripheral constructions such as boat-houses, are also noted. New information from the Chalcolithic tell site of BorduƟani-Popină, Romania and seasonally occupied Viking settlement of Heimdaljordet, Norway, is introduced

    Marco Gonzalez, Ambergris Caye, Belize: a Geoarchaeological Record of Ground Raising Associated With Surface Soil Formation and the Presence of a Dark Earth

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    Marco Gonzalez, on the south-west end of the island of Ambergris Caye, Belize, has well-preserved Maya archaeological stratigraphy dating from Preclassic times (ca. 300 B.C.) to the Late Classic period (ca. A.D. 550/600 to 700/760). Although later occupations are recorded by house platforms and inhumations (Terminal Classic to Early Postclassic), and use of the site continued until the 16th century A.D., intact stratigraphy is rare in these cases owing to a greater degree of disturbance. Nonetheless, understanding site formation entails accounting for all processes, including disturbance. The site’s depositional sequence—as revealed through soil micromorphology and chemistry and detailed here—has yielded critical information in two spheres of research. As regards archaeology and the elucidation of Maya activities on the caye over time, soil micromorphology has contributed beyond measure to what we have been able to distinguish as material remains of cultural activity. Detailed descriptions of the nature of the material remains has in turn helped us to clarify or alter interpretations based on artefacts that have been identified or sediments characterised according to traditional recovery techniques. The other major sphere in which soil micromorphology and chemistry play a critical role is in assessment of the environmental impact of human activity, which enables us to construct and test hypotheses concerning how the site formed over time; what materials and elements contributed to the character of the sediments, especially in the formation of a specific Maya Dark Earth type that is developed from carbonate rich deposits; and how the modern surface soils acquired the appearance of a Dark Earth, but essentially differ from them. In terms of agricultural soil sustainability, the Marco Gonzalez surface soil is neo-formed by a woodland vegetation drawing upon the nutrients and constituents present in both the Dark Earth and underlying better preserved stratified deposits

    Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: the Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

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    Most archaeological projects today integrate, at least to some degree, how past people engaged with their surroundings, including both how they strategized resource use, organized technological production, or scheduled movements within a physical environment, as well as how they constructed cosmologies around or created symbolic connections to places in the landscape. However, there are a multitude of ways in which archaeologists approach the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human-landscape interrelationships. This paper explores some of these approaches for reconstructing the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 23,000–11,500 years BP) landscape of Southwest Asia, using macro- and microscale geoarchaeological approaches to examine how everyday practices leave traces of human-landscape interactions in northern and eastern Jordan. The case studies presented here demonstrate that these Epipalaeolithic groups engaged in complex and far-reaching social landscapes. Examination of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic (EP) highlights that the notion of “Neolithization” is somewhat misleading as many of the features we use to define this transition were already well-established patterns of behavior by the Neolithic. Instead, these features and practices were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview
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