Humppila Järvensuo – a preinvestigation for an archaeological and palaeobotanical project in SW Finland

An as yet unexcavated neolithic dwelling place of a type so far unknown in Finland is presented. The objects found and the nature of the site are reminiscent of bog 'dwellings' in the Eastern Baltic area. 14C dates on the artefacts cover the period 4200-4800 B.P. An increase in the heliophilous pollen flora together with the macrofossil records helps in determining the vertical position of the cultural layer in the gyttja. A rich macrofossil assemblage of useful plants (including Trapa natans) is recorded

Linking forest cover, soil erosion and mire hydrology to late-Holocene human activity and climate in NW Spain

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm).This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Forest clearance is one of the main drivers of soil erosion and hydrological changes in mires, although climate may also play a significant role. Because of the wide range of factors involved, understanding these complex links requires long-term multi-proxy approaches and research on the best proxies to focus. A peat core from NW Spain (Cruz do Bocelo mire), spanning the last ~3000 years, has been studied at high resolution by physical (density and loss on ignition (LOI)), geochemical (elemental composition) and palynological (pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs) analyses. Proxies related to mineral matter fluxes from the catchment (lithogenic tracers, Glomus and Entorrhiza), rainfall (Bromine), mire hydrology (HdV-18), human pressure (Cerealia-type, nitrophilous taxa and coprophilous fungi) and forest cover (mesophilous tree taxa) were the most useful to reconstruct the evolution of the mire and its catchment. Forest clearance for farming was one of the main drivers of environmental change from at least the local Iron Age (~2685 cal. yr BP) onwards. The most intense phase of deforestation occurred during Roman and Germanic times and the late Middle Ages. During these phases, the entire catchment was affected, resulting in enhanced soil erosion and severe hydrological modifications of the mire. Climate, especially rainfall, may have also accelerated these processes during wetter periods. However, it is noteworthy that the hydrology of the mire seems to have been insensitive to rainfall variations when mesophilous forest dominated. Abrupt changes were only detected once intense forest clearance commenced during the Iron Age/Roman transition (~2190 cal. yr BP) phase, which represented a tipping point in catchment's ability to buffer impacts. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of studying ecosystems' long-term trajectories and catchment-wide processes when implementing mire habitat protection measures.This work was funded by the projects CGL2010-20672 (Plan Nacional I+D+i, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation) and 10PXIB200182PR (General Directorate of I+D, Xunta de Galicia). N Silva-Sánchez and L López-Merino are currently supported by a FPU predoctoral scholarship (AP2010-3264) funded by the Spanish Government and a MINT postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Brunel Institute for the Environment, respectively

Archaeological background of ancient Lake Päijänne and geological dating of the meso-neolithic boundary in Finland

The elevation of the Ancient Lake Päijänne transgression maximum has been studied with the aid of 27 datable Stone Age shore-side dwelling places. The transition from the Mesolithic Stone Age to the Neolithic Stone Age and the change of the discharge channel of Ancient Päijänne from the Hinkua river to the Kymi river were almost simultaneous occurrences. The absolute age, expressed in C14-years, is in the order of 5 810 + 70 years. The transgression niveau is supposed to be nearly linear

Iron production in second millennium AD pastoralist contexts on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya

Iron has played an important role within East African pastoralist societies for many hundreds of years, yet the means by which iron was produced or obtained by these communities has not been thoroughly documented. The bulk of our understanding is presently based on a limited number of ethnographic and artefact studies, which have tended to focus on the functional and symbolic nature of iron objects themselves. We argue that the research presented here provides the first opportunity to add to this narrow knowledge base by reconstructing the iron production technologies of pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Kenya, using an archaeometallurgical approach. Seven furnaces and one iron-production refuse area were excavated at two discrete workshop sites in Laikipia, central Kenya, that date to the second half of the second millennium AD. The recovered archaeometallurgical materials were analysed using optical microscopy, SEM-EDS and ED-XRF. These techniques revealed that the smelting technologies in question were complex and sophisticated and that they utilised titania-rich black sands and lime-rich charcoal. Whereas the technical approach and raw materials were found to be similar at both sites studied, there was striking stylistic variation in furnace design for no apparent functional reason, which might suggest nuanced differences in the socio-cultural affiliations of the smelters who worked at these sites. This paper explores some of the possible reasons for these differences. In particular, by integrating archaeological data with existing ethnographic and ethnohistoric research from the region, we discuss the technological choices of the smelters and what this might tell us about their identities, as well as considering how future research should best be targeted in order to develop a greater understanding of the organisation of production within pastoralist central Kenya