Buried Holocene soils and their information value for the interpretation of ancient landscape; case study Vršce
Abstract
Buried soils might be a useful environmental archive for the understanding past climate and the role of human in the development of recent soil record. Their presence in the landscape is limited, therefore the research and methodological approaches in this field is still the progress.
Buried soils are usually connected with the archaeological record, so their research brings also the information value linked to the past occupation. Case study presented in this paper introduce the archaeological site Vršce.
The site is located on the shallow slope composed of loess and loess like deposits. Recent soil cover correspond more likely to the Cambic soils.
There was excavated a number of sunken features of the Luzice culture. The objects are sunken in the brown soil, which was lately covered by slope deposits and the new soil started to develop there.
The methodological approaches used for the determination of the information value at two separate sections were the sedimentology connected with micromorphology, grain size analyses and pedogeochemical analyses as for example Mehlich III, total geochemical composition, CEC, TOC and TN. Also macroremains and anthracological analyses of buried soils and infillings of objects were studied.
Finally, three different horizons were divided, with typical sighs of plowing in the recent layer confirmed also by presence of different fertilizers together with the course sand fraction. The presence of the buried A horizon is detected by the increase of bacterial activity.
There is a difference between the availability of different elements between recent and buried A horizons given by different usage of fertilizers and usage of the soil. Buried soils and infilling of archaeological features contain the abundance of oak charcoal and also common presence of different cereals documenting the intensity of human occupation of the studied site.