Human Transformations of the Earth

By Charles French

This book charts and explains how human activities have shaped and altered the development of soils in many parts of the world, taking advantage of five decades of soil analytical work in many archaeological landscapes from around the globe. The core of this volume describes and illustrates major transformations of soils and the processes involved in these that have occurred during the Holocene and how these relate to human activities as much as natural causes and trajectories of development, right up to the present day. This is done in two ways: first by examining a number of major processes and impacts on the landscape such as Holocene warming and the development of woodland, clearance and agricultural activities, and second by examining the trajectories of these changes in soil systems in different palaeo-environmental situations in several diverse parts of the world. The transformations identified are relevant to prevalent themes of today such as over-development and soil, land and environmental degradation and resilience. The studies articulated relate to Britain, southeastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, East Africa, northern India and Peru in South America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789259216

Book preview

Studying Scientific Archaeology

Studying Scientific Archaeology is a series of titles from Oxbow Books. The series produces books on a wide variety of scientific topics in archaeology aimed at students at all levels. These examine the methods, procedures and reasoning behind various scientific approaches to archaeological data and present case studies or extended examples to demonstrate how data is used and interpretations are arrived at.

In particular we aim that they should demonstrate how scientific analyses contribute to our wider understanding of past human behaviour, technology and economy. The series title reflects an inclusivity in the volumes in the sense of encouraging readers in practical research rather than just presenting collected papers as statements of work completed.

Our aim is that these titles will come to feature as recommended reading for university courses, providing a sound basis for the appreciation and application of scientific archaeology.

Already published in this series

French, C. 2015. A handbook of geoarchaeological approaches for investigating landscapes and settlement sites

Hardy, K. & Kubiak-Martens, L. (eds), 2016. Wild Harvest: plants in the hominin and preagrarian human worlds

Allen, M. J. 2017. Molluscs in Archaeology: methods, approaches and applications

Wickham-Jones, C. 2018. Landscape Beneath the Waves: the archaeological investigation of underwater landscapes

French C. 2022. Human Transformations of the Earth

SERIES EDITORS: Michael J. Allen and Terry O’Connor

Published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by

OXBOW BOOKS

The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE

and in the United States by

OXBOW BOOKS

1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

© Oxbow Books and Charles French 2022

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-920-9

Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78925-921-6 (epub)

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022940201

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

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Front cover: A view of the Olaya valley with its layers of irrigation canals and abandoned terraced fields just up-valley from Sangayiaco in the Andes of Peru

Back cover: The c. 1.5 m deep profile revealed at Roberts Grave chambered tomb on Herm in the Channel Islands of the basal Neolithic buried soil/Bronze Age wind-blown sand/Roman buried soil/medieval to recent wind-blown sand sequence

Contents

Author

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Geoarchaeological approaches in archaeology

Endeavour

Development of the discipline of geoarchaeology as part of archaeological investigations

Importance to archaeology, both on settlement sites and in landscape contexts

2. Methodological approaches

Approaches in the field

Landscape to soil-scape

Soils and palaeosols

Formulating research designs

Basic characterisation techniques

Augering and soil/sediment profile description

pH and water quality

Loss-on-ignition

Magnetic susceptibility

More involved techniques

Phosphorus (or phosphate) content

Multi-element analysis by spectrometry techniques

Soil nutrient and fertility status

Micromorphology

FTIR, XRF, EDAX, XRD and SEM

Establishing chronologies: Radiocarbon, OSL and Bayesian approaches

Scales of resolution

Soil nomenclature and classification

3. Soil transformation trajectories in temperate European landscapes

The beginnings to woodland soil development

Disturbance and degradation of woodland soils

Agricultural soil development

Woodland to pasture soils

Acidification and podzolisation

Erosion and colluviation

Alluviation, floodplains and waterlogging

Wetland soils

Cumulative and plaggen soils

4. Major soil transformation trajectories in southern Mediterranean landscape systems

Brown to red Mediterranean soils (Luvisols)

Xeric calcitic soils and soil erosion

Erosion, alluviation and wadi development

5. Major soil transformation trajectories in arid soil systems

Aridisols

Arroyo/colluvial/alluvial systems

The Burj-Masudpur area of the Indus valley, northern India

The central Rio Puerco, New Mexico

The lower Ica valley, southern Peru

The Kerio-Embobut valleys in Marakwet, north-central Kenya

Terracing and irrigation

Aksum, northern Ethiopia

Konso, southern Ethiopia

Engaruka, northern Tanzania

Sangayaico in the upper Ica valley, southern Peru

6. Timescales and longevity of soil processes

Timescales and longevity of soil properties

Soil horizonation and structural development

Within-soil illuviation and textural changes: stability, disturbance and erosion

7. Understanding long-term resilience in transformed soils

Bibliography

Glossary

Author

Charles French is Professor Emeritus of Geoarchaeology in the McBurney Laboratory of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Prior to 1992, when he became a lecturer at Cambridge, he was the palaeo-environmentalist and assistant director for Fenland Archaeological Trust from 1983. He specialises in the analysis and interpretation of buried landscapes and settlement sites using geoarchaeological and micromorphological techniques and has undertaken projects in many countries around the world.

We do not inherit soils from our ancestors, but we borrow them from our children (Northcliff et al. 2015, 154)

To all the students and researcher colleagues that have worked with me during my archaeological career – you have all been a constant inspiration and made many things possible that I would not have attempted on my own

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the colleagues that I have worked with on numerous collaborative projects around the world, and especially Kasia Gdaniec for constant support and inspiration. This book would not have been possible without them!

Project colleagues include: Mike Allen, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Gianna Ayala, Ian Bailiff, Rachel Ballantyne, Graeme Barker, Jeremy Bennett, Anthony Bonanno, David Beresford-Jones, Julie Boreham, Steve Boreham, Dusan Borić, Richard Bradley, Peter Bullock, Chris Carey, John Catt, Bob Chapman, Ben Chan, Petros Chatzimpaloglou, George Chauca, Alan Cresswell, Nathaniel Cutajar, Matt Davies, Matt Davis, Philippe De Smedt, Jane Downes, Milan Djurdjević, Tim Earle, Mark Edmonds, Chris Evans, Stuart Eve, Cruz Ferro-Vasquez, Michelle Farrell, Rudolpho Fattovich, Katrin Fenech, Rose Ferraby, David Friesem, Chris Gaffney, Julie Gardiner, Duncan Garrow, John Gator, Mark Gillings, Melissa Goodman-Elgar, Martin Green, Reuben Grima, Lady Santana Guispe, Stephen Hall, Bob Hatton, Jen Heathcote, Chris Hunt, Martin Jones, Richard Jones, David Kay, Barry Kemp, Tim Kinnaird, Mark Knight, Gabriella Kovaćs, Kristian Kristiansen, Kevin Lane, Carol Lang, Heejin Lee, Helen Lewis, Mike Lewis, Mark Macklin, Richard Macphail, Marco Madella, Eduardo Machicado, Mark Macklin, Caroline Malone, Rob Marchant, Mark Macklin, Richard Macphail, Gary Marriner, Marco Madella, Pat Marsh, Wendy Matthews, Rowan McLaughlin, Rita Melis, Karen Milek, Martin Millett, Aleksandar Milekić, Nicky Milner, Henrietta Moore, Flavia Morello, Peter Murphy, Buzz Nanavati, Sayantani Neogi, Emuobosa Orijemie, Oliver Huaman Oros, Ian Ostericher, Ivana Ozan, Tony Pace, Rog Palmer, Ivana Pandzić, Dave Passmore, Mike Parker Pearson, Slavisa Perić, Richard Periman, Cameron Petrie, Lars Pilø, Josh Pollard, Francis Pryor, Diego Puglisi, Sandy Pullen, James Rackham, Milenko Radivojac, Tonko Rajkovača, David Redhouse, Don Redford, Colin Renfrew, Colin Richards, Judith Roberts, Dave Robinson, Rob Scaife, Alistair Ruffell, David Sanderson, Manuel San Román, Chris Scarre, Linda Scott-Cummings, Giovanni Serreli, Colin Shell, Ravindra Nath Singh, Dagfinn Skre, Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, Ljubica Srdić, Simon Stoddart, Fraser Sturt, Federica Sulas, Daryl Stump, Pal Sumegi, Maisie Taylor, Sean Taylor, Tjeerd van Andel, Sander van der Leeuw, Marc Vander Linden, Emmanuelle Vaccaro, Nicholas Vella, Magdi Vicze, Gillian Wallace, Joanna Walker, Kate Welham, Todd Whitelaw, Tony Wilkinson and Yijie Zhuang.

Finally, David Redhouse is thanked for all his sterling work in producing many of the illustrations, and to Mike Allen, Gianna Ayala, Tony Brown, Ian Bailiff, David Beresford-Jones, Matt Davies, Philippe De Smedt, Katrin French, Tim Kinnaird, Helen Lewis, Karen Milek, Buzz Nanavati, Sayantani Neogi, Ian Ostericher, Rog Palmer, Richard Periman, Cameron Petrie, Mike Robinson, Charlotte Rowley, Chris Scarre, Federica Sulas, Pal Sumegi, Daryl Stump and Dave Webb (Cambridge Archaeological Unit) for either providing figures and/or allowing me to use others from their projects.

1. Introduction

Endeavour

If we understand the very complex soil system, we then understand ourselves and the nature around us

(Mermut 2020)

This book aims to chart and explain how human activities have shaped and altered the development of soils in many parts of the world, taking advantage of five decades of soil analytical work in many archaeological landscapes from around the globe.

There are a number of very good geoarchaeological textbooks that deal with the methodological approaches in the discipline (i.e. Courty et al. 1989; Waters 1992; Goldberg and Macphail 2006; Nicosia and Stoops 2017; Macphail and Goldberg 2018; Karkanas and Goldberg 2019), but very few concentrate on the major transformations of our soil-scapes that have largely formed as a result of human endeavour and long-term landscape and climate changes such as the effects of agriculture and desertification. In many ways, this book aims to build on Bridges’ 1978 World Soils book by adding the human (archaeological) dimensions to chart how major impacts on landscapes alter, adapt and transform the soil developmental history, in several major climatic regions of the world, landscape type by type. It aims to give some new understandings of completed human eco-dynamics experiments of the past, especially in relation to the resilience and sustainability of soils and landscapes, as well as giving historical timedepth to deciphering long-term human interactions with environmental processes and human endeavours.

Of course, there are many good geography/soil science books explaining soil development in the formation of particular landscapes. These for example include those in the Catena Verlag GeoEcology and Supplement series such as Sustainable Use and Management of Soils: arid and semi-arid regions (Cano et al. 2005), or Karst Terrains: environmental changes and human impact (Williams 1993). Also, many geoarchaeological textbooks such as Goldberg and Macphail’s (2006) Practical and Theoretical Geoarchaeology, Macphail and Goldberg’s (2018) Applied Soil Micromorphology in Archaeology, Nicosia and Stoops (2017) Archaeological Soil and Sediment Micromorphology and Karkanas and Goldberg’s (2018) Reconstructing Archaeological Sites: understanding the geoarchaeological matrix and my own Geoarchaeology in Action (French 2003) include multiple case studies which demonstrate human transformations of soil-scapes and lived-in spaces, several of which will again be utilised in this book. But very few books deal explicitly with themed interactions of human activity under different climatic/environmental regimes and how these are exemplified in soil history records and create frameworks for, and narratives of, landscape change. There are also few books that weave human prehistory and history with trajectories of soil change and their attendant consequences, and that are relevant to prevalent themes of today such as over-development and soil, land and environmental degradation and resilience.

The core of this volume describes and illustrates major transformations of soils and the processes involved in these that have occurred particularly during the Holocene and how these relate to human activities as much as natural causes and trajectories of development, right up to the present day. This will be done in two ways: first by examining a number of major processes and impacts on the landscape such as Holocene warming and the development of woodland, clearance and agricultural activities and, second, by examining the trajectories of these changes in soil systems in different palaeoenvironmental situations in several diverse parts of the world. The studies articulated will mainly relate to Britain, south-eastern Europe, the Mediterranean basin, East Africa, northern India and Peru in South America (Fig. 1.1).

How have both human activities and natural events (both long and short term) lead to different modifications of soils, and how have people adapted their living and coping strategies, or changed them altogether as the soil system becomes more marginal and unsustainable for agricultural use? Examining the signature features of these transformation sequences in different parts of the world will provide breadth and examples of multiple responses. This will involve explaining processes of soil change and how a soil’s internal features such as structure, clay and silty clay coatings and secondary components may change as a result of the influence of a human activity. These activities can include ploughing or irrigation, for example, and their potential impacts on soil fertility and hydrological status and, therefore, their effects on the resilience and sustainability of that soil in that situation for its continuing use as a useful agricultural soil. This information then feeds into a broader discussion about the heritage aspects of soils, past and present, and the longer term implications of soil management, resilience and degradation on landscapes. The case studies are drawn from around the world to show trajectories of changes in soil types through time and variations that may occur dependent on differing climatic and geological regimes.

This chapter is part historiographical, briefly charting the development of the discipline of geoarchaeology. Then it will examine its increasing role in research and commercial archaeology over the past few decades and how the geoarchaeological record of any landscape adds much greater time-depth to the consideration of landscape change and humans’ roles in any changes. The role of geoarchaeology in informing land management strategies will also be considered, and especially aspects of the time-depth and lessons already learnt. As Sander van der Leeuw (2018) suggests, geoarchaeology can play a distinctive role in collecting data on the physico-chemical and living environment, which, when coupled with the archaeological record of past societies, can reveal socio-environmental dynamics and explain how shorter term landscape dynamics may be changing over the longer term. We can also link the past and present, and learn from both for the future, and thus help to extend the value of geoarchaeology as a discipline for all to appreciate.

Figure 1.1 Location map of the main study areas and many of the sites across the globe: 1 Kaupang, Norway; 2 Barnhouse, Stonehall Farm and Crossiecrown, Orkney; 3 Thy, Denmark; 4 Islay, Scotland; 5 Star Carr, Yorkshire; 6 East Anglia, England; 7 Botai, Kazakhstan; 8 Pollenbak, Netherlands; 9 Stonehenge and Avebury, Wiltshire; 10 Cranborne Chase, Dorset; 11 Herm, Channel Islands; 12 Brînzeni and Buzdujeni, Moldova; 13 Szazhalombatta, Benta valley, Hungary; 14 Viverone, Italy; 15 Zecovi, Sana valley, Bosnia i Herzegovina; 16 Drenovac, Serbia; 17 Posada, Sardinia; 18 Tomar, Upper Tejo; 19 Troina, Sicily; 20 Çatalhüyük, Turkey; 21 Gatas, Aguas valley, Spain; 22 Amorgos, Keros and Dhaskalio, Greece; 23 Tell Brak, Syria; 24 Rio Puerco, New Mexico; 25 Malta and Gozo; 26 Baeskuk and Choenan, South Korea; 27 Beirut, Lebanon; 28 Maoshan, China; 29 Masudpur and Burj, Haryana, India; 30 El’Amarna, Egypt; 31 Saar, Bahrain; 32 Karnak, Egypt; 33 North Gujarat, India; 34 Cidade Velha, Cape Verde; 35 Dhamar, Yemen; 36 Aksum, Ethiopia; 37 Konso, Ethiopia; 38 Tot, Kenya; 39 Engaruka, Tanzania; 40 Ica Valley, Peru; 41 Upper Limpopo, South Africa; 42 Brunswick Peninsula and Pali Aike, Chile; 43 Marazzi, Tierra del Fuego, Chile (D. Redhouse)

Development of the discipline of geoarchaeology as part of archaeological investigations

Geoarchaeology is the combined study of archaeological, soil and geomorphological records and the recognition of how natural, climatic and human-induced processes alter landscapes (French 2013, 3). The main aim of geoarchaeology is to construct integrated models of human-environmental systems and to interrogate the nature, sequence and causes of human versus natural impacts on our landscapes. It is equally important at the macro-scale of land-use and landscape change as at the meso- and micro-scale for the use of space and human activities in a settlement context. At any scale, it is possible to investigate the formation and modification of past soils, sediments and occupation sequences, primarily through the use of soil micromorphological techniques (or the study of the components, features and fabrics of soils and sediments at the microscopic level in thin section) combined with various physical and geo-chemical techniques (e.g. Kubiena 1938; Bullock et al. 1985; Courty et al. 1989; Waters 1992; Rapp and Hill 1998; Goldberg and Macphail 2006; Blume 2008; Wilson et al. 2008; Fleisher and Sulas 2015; Macphail and Goldberg 2018). Kubiena (1938) viewed ‘micro-pedology’ (or micromorphology) as part of general pedology examining the genesis, morphology, dynamics and biology of soils. Blume (2008) widened the remit of micromorphology to be a tool which is able to integrate all soil disciplines. Of course, this field of study only benefits from corroborative and complementary sets of other palaeo-environmental data, especially chronological, stratigraphical, palynological, macro-botanical, faunal and molluscan data. It could be said that geoarchaeology is an over-arching discipline capable of integrating all these types of complementary data to create long term histories of human landscape development. Without utilising geoarchaeology and its approaches, attaining a better understanding human contexts of living is generally inadequate.

In Britain, there has been a long standing tradition of landscape archaeology, perhaps first exemplified by Sir Cyril Fox’s seminal books The Personality of Britain (1938) and The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (1923). These books considered archaeological sites and monuments within their landscape context and his examination of topographical aspects versus the distribution of sites, artefacts and human remains is more-or-less an early attempt of a GIS-style interrogation of landscapes. In Hoskins’ (1955) The Making of the English Landscape, there is a more inter-disciplinary approach combining archaeological, historical, geographical and botanical data to examine effectively the ecological impacts of human activities on the landscape and similarly a wide poly-naturalist’s view in Oliver Rackham’s The History of the [British] Countryside (1986). Combined palaeo-vegetational and soil development studies with real implications for the impact of human intervention in the landscape went hand-in-hand with this approach, best exemplified by Dimbleby’s (1962) book on The Development of British Heathlands and their Soils.

This flavour of landscape interrogation and analysis has continued with the development of environmental archaeology from the 1970s onwards, especially in Britain. This can be seen in a number of books such as Evans’ (1999) Land and Archaeology: histories of human environment in the British Isles, Evans and O’Connor’s (2005) Environmental Archaeology: principals and methods and Wilkinson and Stevens (2003) Environmental Archaeology: approaches, techniques and applications texts. The essence of this approach was to move away from investigating sites in isolation to viewing them as integral with their contemporary soils and surrounding landscape. Understanding the palaeo-environmental setting and the consequences of long term human activities in any landscape are crucial to the interpretation of the archaeological record. Indeed, the development of aerial photography to visualise landscapes and the imprints of human endeavours is seen from the earlier 20th century with the work of Crawford (1924), St Joseph (1951) and others like Palmer (1984; Mills and Palmer 2007) before moving to the development of Lidar imaging of past landscapes (Bewley et al. 2005). These developing studies demonstrate that landscapes are dynamically changing systems through time under human influence with a number of relationships, often inter-dependent, between people and their environment through climate, landforms, soils and vegetation. In the final analysis, what probably matters most is the notion of knowing what is going on between ‘people and their surroundings’ (Evans 1999, 6; after F.E. Zeuner) and the interactions and changes occurring over time. Geoarchaeology, of course, is ideally placed as a discipline to take on this all-encompassing investigative role (French 2014).

More recently, with the expansion of commercial archaeology being undertaken in advance of development projects in many parts of the world, geoarchaeology has found a new and expanding role in many types of large landscape scale quarrying and construction projects, many of which are highly destructive of huge swathes of our landscapes (e.g. Hearne and Birbeck 1999; French and Pryor 2005; Evans et al. 2016). In Britain this role may be purely as part of an environmental impact assessment (e.g. English Heritage 1994; Canti 1995; Darvill and Fulton 1998; Davis 2019), or site/landscape management (Wagner et al. 1997; French 2009), for prospection and deposit modelling (e.g. French and Lewis 2005; Carey et al. 2018), for preservation by record in association with the investigation of archaeological sites and landscapes as part of the planning process (e.g. Cromarty et al. 2006; Evans et al. 2016; Knight and Brudenell 2020), as well as for establishing sequences of river valley formation and river avulsion (e.g. French et al. 1992; Knight and Howard 2004; Geary et al. 2016), and understanding on-site sequences where sites are buried or accumulating in a tell-like fashion (e.g. Matthews et al. 1997a; 1997b). In all these cases, a geoarchaeological approach is perfect for deciphering the pre-site landscape formation, how human built/used space has transformed the area in life, and how that landscape or site has changed post-burial through a variety of post-depositional processes (Goldberg and Macphail 2006; English Heritage 2007; French 2015a). It gives a detailed view of the longue durée of change which is second to none, especially when combined with complementary archaeological and palaeo-environmental analyses, even though some would say that geoarchaeology and especially micromorphology are drastically under-utilised as part of the archaeologist’s repertoire of available techniques (Goldberg and Aldeias 2018).

Importance to archaeology, both on settlement sites and in landscape contexts

The contribution of geoarchaeology is integral to archaeology. Indeed, the understanding of stratigraphy in the field, site formation processes and landscape reconstruction are the most fundamental tenets of geoarchaeology (cf. Butzer 1982; Waters 1992; Rapp and Hill 1998). Having a thorough understanding of the context of a site in its landscape is central to any interpretation of landscape change and the associated human dimensions and influences. The nature of the potential information ranges from the regional to microscales, and can contribute at a whole variety of scales, contexts and levels to the detailed interpretation of archaeological sites and past and present day landscapes. Increasingly over the past couple of decades geoarchaeological methods have become a mainstream part of most archaeological projects, although the application of soil micromorphology is not always possible because of time, funding and too few practitioners and laboratories to meet the demand.

Geoarchaeology presents a very valuable set of techniques with the ability to analyse and interpret any landscape, past or present. Essentially the suite of descriptive and analytical techniques allows both interrogation of how and why the deposit sequence is found as it is and what may be their origins and causes of development, movement or redeposition, and what may be the role of different human activities in causing soil and landscape change. Moreover, if buried soils or old land surfaces are present, these provide immense sequenced detail on the development of past landscapes through time, especially when investigated using micromorphological analysis. Such buried contexts usually contain microscopic signatures of the events that have affected this location through time and these have a bearing on how the wider surrounding landscape was shaped through time.

A major task in geoarchaeology is identifying the role and forms of past agriculture and the nature of its impact on soils and landscapes, both in the past and today. Central to this is recognising the fertility of soils through their organic and elemental components, with implications for longer term resilience and sustainability of use of soils in different landscapes and environmental systems. There is an abundance of literature on the recognition of arable agriculture using micromorphological techniques (e.g. Jongerius 1970; 1983; Gebhardt 1992; 1995; Macphail 1992; Lewis 2012). Although we know which elements are responsible for keeping the levels of fertility and organic status high in soils (Bunting 1967; FitzPatrick 1986, 110; Sandor and Eash 1991; Abbott and Murphy 2003; Jordan-Meille et al. 2012; Thomaz et al. 2014), studies which relate these measurable factors to past landscapes and are much fewer and remain a rather neglected field of research to date. We often rely on other types of proxy data (e.g. the pollen and macro-botanical records) to infer suggestions about the viability and use of landscapes in the past. Independent dating and complementary/corroborative palaeoenvironmental data of these periods of soil development and relative landscape stability are of course crucial to establishing long term chronologies and sequences of land use and landscape change and relating these to human occupation of the wider landscape. These themes will be developed further in Chapters 3–7 of this book.

Geoarchaeological approaches are also an essential component of the microstratigraphic analysis of former settlement sites, whether it is an open air, single occupation structure or multiple aggradations of many structures and depositionary events in a tell mound. When combined with structural and archaeological analyses, micromorphological and geo-chemical studies can often give specific answers about the sequences of use in life of structures and open areas on a site, as well as chart the nature and effects of post-depositional processes (Courty et al. 1989; Matthews et al. 1997a; 1997b; Milek and French 2007; Milek 2012; 2012b; Shillito and Ryan 2013; Karkanas and Goldberg 2019). Geoarchaeological studies of floors, occupation deposits and construction materials for example, both complement and augment the interpretation of archaeological record, especially when considered spatially against the available artefact distributions, and macro-botanical and faunal remains evidence.

Ethnographic, present day and experimental analogues are also very important tools for providing possibilities for the interpretation of geo-chemical results and micromorphological analyses. This might simply be the verification of the microscopic features created by ard ploughing (Lewis 2012) versus spade or hoe (Gebhardt 1992) versus modern ploughing (Jongerius 1983), the recognition of shifting agricultural systems in Maasai herder-gatherer settlements in East Africa (Shahack-Gross et al. 2004), the identification of livestock dung (Shahack-Gross 2011) and construction materials (Gur-Arieh et al. 2018), what is wood ash versus burnt dung (Wattez and Courty 1987; Shahack-Gross 2011) and the type of combustion feature (Mallol et al. 2017), or whether it is calcitic or gypsum-rich plaster (Karkanas 2007) for example. Or the ethnographic analogues could provide possible suggestions as to how social actions and beliefs may have helped to control the formation of the sediment complex as observed and analysed (Boivin 2000; Shahack-Gross et al. 2009; Friesem et al. 2016; 2017a).

In combination with different scales of analysis, targeted questions and complementary palaeo-environmental techniques, geoarchaeological approaches are one of the best ways of explaining and understanding the development of a site and its landscape through time. Significantly, the