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Settlement activity in later prehistory: invisible in the archaeological record but documented by pollen and sedimentary evidence

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Abstract

The paper deals with landscape and settlement development between ca. 300 BC and AD 600 in a defined area of the northern Czech Republic. Despite favourable natural conditions, human occupation of the area did not begin until the end of the first millennium BC. Natural soil and vegetation development therefore lasted longer than in the traditionally settled lowland areas. Initial settlement activity from the La Tène period caused substantial erosion of deforested luvisols and retisols, well-documented by an accumulation of eroded soil horizons in a local wetland. The erosion process continued for more than 500 years following the end of the La Tène settlement, despite the fact that archaeological research revealed no reliable evidence of occupation prior to the twelfth century AD. Pollen and sedimentary records from the wetland, however, clearly indicate the existence of settlement activity during the “archaeologically invisible” Roman and Migration periods. This case is not unique and underlines the importance of environmental analysis for the detection of settlement history, particularly during periods of poor archaeological visibility or in places that are difficult to research using standard archaeological methods. The change in conditions after the first deforestation and subsequent late prehistoric settlement triggered the degradation of the deforested luvisols and retisols and led to the diversification of the soil cover, which now also includes regosols, gleysols, and truncated luvisols and retisols.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the following for their invaluable assistance: Čeněk Čišecký for the graphics and for technical support; Petr Pokorný for contributions to the PALYCZ database used for plotting Fig. 9; Zbyněk Engel for granulometry measurements; Lukáš Vlček for the help during the fieldwork; and Jiří Šebesta and Michal Raichl for helpful advices.

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The research was funded by the programme RVO 67985912.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Prague, Letenská 4, 118 01, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Dagmar Dreslerová, Radka Kozáková & Barbora Strouhalová

  2. Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Albertov 6, 128 43, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Tomáš Chuman, Štefan Poništiak & Luděk Šefrna

  3. Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University, 128 01, Prague 2, Czech Republic

    Vojtěch Abraham

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  1. Dagmar Dreslerová
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Dreslerová, D., Kozáková, R., Chuman, T. et al. Settlement activity in later prehistory: invisible in the archaeological record but documented by pollen and sedimentary evidence. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 11, 1683–1700 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0614-x

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