Reconstructing the Holocene paleoenvironment of the semi-arid Shiraki Plain of eastern Georgia – a center of settlement activity during the Late Bronze and Early Iron age

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgi Kirkitadze ◽  
Mikheil Elashvili ◽  
Levan Navrozashvili ◽  
Mikheil Lobjanidze ◽  
Levan Losaberidze ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Hydrological Modeling ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Large City ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Main Question

<p>Studying of the interactions between past environmental changes and former human societies delivers key information to understand the future evolution of landscapes under changing environmental conditions and increasing human stress. The combination of these two factors is especially critical for fragile landscapes such as drylands, where even small-scale climatic or anthropogenic factors can have relatively large effects on the landscape dynamics.</p><p>Holocene paleoenvironmental changes on the Shiraki Plain, located in Eastern Georgia (South Caucasus), were studied. The selected site is characterized by semiarid climate conditions (annual precipitation <500 mm per year) and an open dry steppic landscape today. Currently the area is devoid of settlements, due to absence of water resources. However, recent archaeological data collected using remote sensing and ground-proven by ongoing archaeological excavations, delivered evidences of an active former human inhabitation of this area mostly during the Late Bronze - Early Iron Ages. Several large, city-type settlements of the given period that were identified on the Shiraki Plain suggest the existence of early state formation under favorable environmental conditions.</p><p>During the conducted study we have combined stratigraphical-sedimentological investigations of sediments using drilling cores, trenches and laboratory analyses with high-resolution D-GPS measurements in the RTK mode, remote sensing using drone photogrammetric surveys, paleoecological investigations, and hydrological modeling. Our initial results clearly support the hypothesis of a large shallow lake in the center of the Shiraki Plain that was surrounded by the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age settlements. Therefore, the regional water balance of that period was obviously more positive than today. Furthermore, our investigations indicate that this period of high settlement intensity was characterized by intensive soil erosion processes that washed away the dominant Chernozem soils.</p><p>Altogether, our investigations suggest a tipping point of the landscape evolution dynamics that must have been crossed during the Late Bronze and Early Iron period, leading to the current dry steppic landscape. This also provides key information to reconstruct the archaeological past of the region, and to address the main question of rapid depopulation and further abandonment of this area.</p>

scholarly journals New materials of Early Iron Age from river Luha valley

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 154-182
Author(s):  
Zoya Ilchyshyn ◽  
Oleksandr Silayev
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Gas Production ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Production Facility ◽  
National Academy Of Sciences ◽  
Type Group ◽  
Cultural Conversation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Migratory Movements

The article submits the results of protective archaeological studies conducted in 2016–2018 by scientific research center “Rescue Archaeological Service” (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institite of archaeology) at the Lokachi gas production facility. Excavations have been made on the settlements Markovychi 1, Markovychi 2, Mizhgirya 1, Mizhgirya 3, Rohovychi 1 and Rohovychi 2 which contained materials of Early Iron Age. Until recently only three sites of that period were discovered in Lokachi district, undoubtedly a minor achievement especially by comparison with fruitful studies made by L. Krushelnytska, G. Okhrimenko, I. Mykhalchyshyn, V. Konoplia and S. Terskyi across the neighboring Volodymyr-Volynski, Ivanychi and Lutsk districts of Volyn region. Therefore, any new excavation results would make an essential influx of information on Early Iron Age settlement structure in the valley of river Luga. The article analyses items, mostly handmade pottery from cultural layers and archaeological objects, often found alongside with another materials of different cultural and chronological origins. The largest item collections have been discovered on the settlements Rohovychi 1 and Mizhgirya 3 which included household structures full with pottery of distinctive forms and décor elements that is of so called Lesznytsia type of Early Scythian time culture. Shapes and technological characteristics of local pottery resemble peculiar features of same item category on the Early Iron Age archaeological sites from neighboring Rivne and Lviv regions. On contrary they miss the same features on the synchronous sites in the southern parts of Volyn region. This certainly provokes issues regarding the inner transfers and cultural conversation among the populaces of Lezhnytsia type group. Seemingly small-scale survey studies and excavations have produces substantial results but additionally they announced great prospects of further regional studies important for evaluation of migratory movements and settlement evolution in the area on the ridge crossing between the basins of Western Bug and Pryp’iat revers. Key words: Early Iron Age, Lezhnytsia type group, Lokachi gas production facility, archaeological surveys, settlement, pottery.

scholarly journals Remote Sensing Reveals Lasting Legacies of Land-Use by Small-Scale Foraging Communities in the Southwestern Indian Ocean

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dylan S. Davis ◽  
Kristina Douglass
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Environment Interaction ◽  
Human Environment ◽  
Landscape Modification ◽  
Geochemical Properties

Archaeologists interested in the evolution of anthropogenic landscapes have productively adopted Niche Construction Theory (NCT), in order to assess long-term legacies of human-environment interactions. Applications of NCT have especially been used to elucidate co-evolutionary dynamics in agricultural and pastoral systems. Meanwhile, foraging and/or highly mobile small-scale communities, often thought of as less intensive in terms of land-use than agropastoral economies, have received less theoretical and analytical attention from a landscape perspective. Here we address this lacuna by contributing a novel remote sensing approach for investigating legacies of human-environment interaction on landscapes that have a long history of co-evolution with highly mobile foraging communities. Our study is centered on coastal southwest Madagascar, a region inhabited by foraging and fishing communities for close to two millennia. Despite significant environmental changes in southwest Madagascar’s environment following human settlement, including a wave of faunal extinctions, little is known about the scale, pace and nature of anthropogenic landscape modification. Archaeological deposits in this area generally bear ephemeral traces of past human activity and do not exhibit readily visible signatures of intensive land-use and landscape modification (e.g., agricultural modifications, monumental architecture, etc.). In this paper we use high-resolution satellite imagery and vegetative indices to reveal a legacy of human-landscape co-evolution by comparing the characteristics – vegetative productivity and geochemical properties – of archaeological sites to those of locations with no documented archaeological materials. Then, we use a random forest (RF) algorithm and spatial statistics to quantify the extent of archaeological activity and use this analysis to contextualize modern-day human-environment dynamics. Our results demonstrate that coastal foraging communities in southwest Madagascar over the past 1,000 years have extensively altered the landscape. Our study thus expands the temporal and spatial scales at which we can evaluate human-environment dynamics on Madagascar, providing new opportunities to study early periods of the island’s human history when mobile foraging communities were the dominant drivers of landscape change.

The Iron Age Enclosures and Prehistoric Landscape of Sutton Common, South Yorkshire

1997 ◽  
Vol 63 ◽  
pp. 221-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Parker Pearson ◽  
R.E. Sydes ◽  
S. Boardman ◽  
B. Brayshay ◽  
P.C. Buckland ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Late Neolithic ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Plant Remains ◽  
Archaeological Materials ◽  
Middle Bronze Age

The Early Iron Age enclosures and associated sites on Sutton Common on the western edge of the Humberhead Levels contain an exceptional variety of archaeological data of importance not only to the region but for the study of later prehistory in the British Isles. Few other later prehistoric British sites outside the East Anglian fens and the Somerset Levels have thus far produced the quantity and quality of organically preserved archaeological materials that have been found, despite the small scale of the investigations to date. The excavations have provided an opportunity to integrate a variety of environmental analyses, of wood, pollen, beetles, waterlogged and carbonised plant remains, and of soil micromorphology, to address archaeological questions about the character, use, and environment of this Early Iron Age marsh fort. The site is comprised of a timber palisaded enclosure and a succeeding multivallate enclosure linked to a smaller enclosure by a timber alignment across a palaeochannel, with associated finds ranging in date from the Middle Bronze Age to the Roman and medieval periods. Among the four adjacent archaeological sites is an Early Mesolithic occupation site, also with organic preservation, and there is a Late Neolithic site beneath the large enclosure. Desiccation throughout the common is leading to the damage and loss of wooden and organic remains. It is hoped that the publication of these results, of investigations between 1987 and 1993, will lead to a fuller investigation taking place.

scholarly journals Dark Ages woodland recovery and the expansion of beech: a study of land use changes and related woodland dynamics during the Roman to Medieval transition period in northern Belgium

2020 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koen Deforce ◽  
Jan Bastiaens ◽  
Philippe Crombé ◽  
Ewoud Deschepper ◽  
Kristof Haneca ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Secondary Forest ◽  
Land Use Changes ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ilex Aquifolium ◽  
Early Medieval Period

Abstract The results from analyses of botanical remains (pollen, wood, charcoal, seeds) from several archaeological features excavated in Kluizen (northern Belgium) are presented. The region was largely uninhabited until the Iron Age and Roman period when a rural settlement was established, resulting in small-scale woodland clearance. The site was subsequently abandoned from c. AD 270 till the High Middle Ages. The results of the archaeological and archaeobotanical analyses provide information on changes in land use and resulting dynamics of woodland cover and composition between c.600 BC and AD 1200, with a spatial and temporal resolution unrivalled in northern Belgium. Especially the long period of woodland regeneration following abandonment of the site around AD 270, covering the Late Roman and Early Medieval period, could be reconstructed in detail. Abandoned fields were first covered with pioneer woodland (Salix, Corylus and Betula), then Quercus-dominated secondary forest and finally a late-successional forest with Fagus sylvatica, Carpinus betulus and Ilex aquifolium, an evolution that took over 300 years. The results also indicate that the observed increase of Fagus during the Early Middle Ages, which was never an important element in the woodland vegetation in northern Belgium before, was related to climatic changes rather than anthropogenic factors.

scholarly journals The Layout and Internal Development of Celtic Fields: Structural and Relative Chronological Analyses of Three Danish Field Systems

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Helt Nielsen ◽  
Mads Kähler Holst ◽  
Ann Catherine Gadd ◽  
Klaus Kähler Holst
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Optimization Algorithm ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Internal Development ◽  
Field System ◽  
Field Boundaries ◽  
Field Systems ◽  
Stochastic Optimization Algorithm

The layout and development of field systems may reflect significant aspects of prehistoric societies such as agricultural strategies, use rights and inheritance practices. This article presents a method for analysing the developments of field systems in their entirety, based on a hierarchical sorting of field boundaries whose intersections have been used to define relations of equivalence and subordination. The formalized relational expression of the field system is analysed using a stochastic optimization algorithm. The method was successfully applied to three Danish Celtic fields from the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age, making it possible to identify five principles behind the layout: primary boundaries (probably established at community level), major parcels (administered at a household level), structured subdivisions (presumably related to inheritance), irregular subdivisions, and small-scale expansions of the field systems. The initial degree of regularity of the field systems seems to have influenced later modifications.

scholarly journals An Early Iron Age Camp of Reindeer Hunters in the Bolshezemelskaya Tundra, Nenets Autonomous Okrug

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-84
Author(s):  
A. M. Murygin ◽  
P. A. Kosintsev ◽  
T. I. Marchenko-Vagapova
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Radiocarbon Dates ◽  
Eolian Sand ◽  
Animal Bones ◽  
Reindeer Hunting ◽  
A Site

This study outlines the fi ndings of excavations at More-Yu II—a site in the northern Bolshezemelskaya tundra. The habitation layer with numerous charcoal lenses was discovered inside the layer of buried soil overlain by eolian sand. Most fi nds are ceramics and animal bones. Arrowheads, o rnaments, tools, and ritual items are very rare. On the basis of palynological and faunal analyses, environmental changes from the sub-boreal warming until the end of the sub-Atlantic period are reconstructed. The temperature regime during the formation of cultural deposits was unstable. The principal subsistence strategy was reindeer hunting. The age of reindeer suggests that habitation periods coincided with cold seasons. Radiocarbon dates generated from reindeer bones point to the Early Iron Age. The camp dwellers were native reindeer hunters inhabiting the tundra belt of northeasternmost Europe. Ceramics representing the More-Yu type belong to the early stage of the Subarctic Pechora culture. They mark the Arctic component that became part of the n orthern Glya denovo population, abruptly changing the Finno-Permic culture of the taiga part of the Pechora basin in northern Urals.

scholarly journals Conflict and Interaction in the Iron Age: The Origins of Urartian–Assyrian Relations

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemalettin Köroğlu
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Eastern Anatolia ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Natural Development ◽  
Middle Iron Age ◽  
Surrounding Areas

The Neo-Assyrian Kingdom and the Urartian Kingdom were two important Near Eastern states in the Middle Iron Age (ninth to sixth centuries BC) that steered political developments and considerably transformed the lives of populations within their territories. This article aims to explore the origins of Urartian–Assyrian relations: the processes and ways through which Mesopotamian and Assyrian influences reached the eastern Anatolian highlands. The populations who founded the Urartian Kingdom lived mostly as semi-nomadic tribes in eastern Anatolia and surrounding areas during the Early Iron Age (thirteenth to ninth centuries BC). It is impossible to explain the emergence of the Urartian Kingdom in the Van region towards the mid-ninth century BC—which quickly became a powerful rival of its contemporaries—as a natural development of local culture. The main question at this stage is how and from where Assyrian influences were transmitted to the tribes who founded the Urartian Kingdom. Our opinion is that the answer to this question should be sought in the Upper Tigris region, which was inhabited by both cultures (Pre-Urartian and Assyrian) before the foundation of the Urartian Kingdom.

scholarly journals CULTURAL LANDSCAPES OF THE NORTHEASTERN PRIAZOV REGION AND THE DON DELTA IN THE EARLY IRON AGE: PROBLEMS OF STUDY AND PROTECTION

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-16
Author(s):  
И.В. ТОЛОЧКО
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Cultural Landscapes ◽  
Anthropogenic Factors ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Middle Holocene ◽  
Rostov Region ◽  
Natural Context ◽  
Azov Region ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Natural And Anthropogenic Factors

Дельты крупных рек с глубокой древности были зонами интенсивных этнокультурных контактов, в эпоху античности – эпицентрами активных цивилизационных процессов. Ярким примером является территория северо-восточного Приазовья, расположенная на стыке обширных природно-географических зон и крупных историко-географических территорий. Проблемы изучения и сохранения ценного природного и историко-культурного территориального комплекса региона являются актуальными на протяжении многих лет. Настоящее исследование посвящено изучению влияния природных и антропогенных факторов на процесс развития ландшафтов северо-восточного Приазовья в раннем железном веке на основе анализа археологических и литологических материалов прибрежных районов Краснодарского края и Ростовской области. Результаты данных естественнонаучных исследований, проведенных за последние годы, позволяют восстановить процессы трансформации природного облика северо-восточного Приазовья и Нижнего Подонья, начиная с эпохи среднего голоцена, в том числе – представить в общих чертах среду обитания и природный контекст, в котором существовали поселения бронзового – раннего железного века региона. Since ancient times, the deltas of large rivers were zones of intense ethnocultural contacts; in the era of antiquity, they have been the epicenters of active civilizational processes. A striking example is the territory of the northeastern Azov region, located at the junction of vast natural and geographical zones and large historical and geographical territories. The problems of studying and preserving the valuable natural, historical and cultural territorial complex of the region have been relevant for many years. This study is devoted to the study of the influence of natural and anthropogenic factors on the development of landscapes in the northeastern Azov region in the early Iron Age based on the analysis of archaeological and lithological materials of the coastal regions of Krasnodar Territory and Rostov Region. The results of these natural scientific studies carried out in recent years make it possible to restore the processes of transformation of the natural appearance of the northeastern Azov and Lower Don regions, starting from the Middle Holocene, including – to provide an outline of the habitat and the natural context in which the Bronze settlements existed – early Iron Age region.

scholarly journals Last 2400 yrs. Environmental changes and human activity recorded in the gyttja-type bottom sediments of the Młynek Lake (Warmia and Masuria Region, northern Poland)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Welc ◽  
Jerzy Nitychoruk ◽  
Leszek Marks ◽  
Krzysztof Bińka ◽  
Anna Rogóż-Matyszczak ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Bottom Sediments ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Environmental Data ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Climate Conditions

Abstract. In the densely forested Warmia and Masuria region (north-eastern Poland) there are many lakes characterized by small size, calm sedimentation and lack of tributaries, which makes them a very good archive of environmental data for the Holocene. For this reason, one of them – the Młynek Lake, located near the village of Janiki Wielkie, has been selected for multi-faceted palaeoenvironmental research based on a precise radiocarbon scale. Bottom sediments of this reservoir also contain unique information about anthropopression, because a defensive settlement has been operating on its northern shore since the early Iron Age to early Medieval period, which gives opportunity to correlate paleoenvironmental data with phases of the human activity in the last 2400 years. Between 3rd–2nd 2century BC the lake was surrounded by a dense forest with domination of warm and wet climate conditions. In turn of 2nd century BC and 2nd century AD forest around reservoir was much reduced, what can be associatedwith the first – early iron age – occupation phase attested on the strong hold located close to the lake. Between 2nd–9th century AD gradual restoration of forest and decline of human settlements is attested, along with lake deepening and onset of colder and humid climatic phase which correspond to global cooling episode known as Bond 1 (1.5 ka BP). Period between 9th–13th century AD indicates again intensive forest clearing around the lake in result of human activity (Middle Age settlement phase on stronghold). This period is characterized by climate change towards warming, which confirms the gradual 33shallowing of the lake (Middle Age warming period). Since 13 up to 17th century AD intensive cultivation34activity around lake tool place. The landscape is subjected to strong human transformations which means that environmental and climate changes are not so clear. However, changes in lake sedimentation can be seen around 1500, which may be associated with so called Little Ice Age - clod interval.

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