par Nicosia, Cristiano ;Devos, Yannick ;Vrydaghs, Luc
Référence Annual Meeting EAA (22: 31th August- 4th September 2016: Vilnius)
Publication Non publié, 2016-09-03
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : Urban dark earths are dark coloured, poorly stratified units, often formed over several centuries that have been uncovered in many European towns (Nicosia & Devos, 2014). Due to their lack of any recognizable internal stratigraphy, standard archaeological approaches typically fail to understand their complex histories.The present contribution will demonstrate how geoarchaeological approaches, and especially micromorphology, can help to understand the often complex formation processes, and to discriminate different human activities and natural processes involved in dark earth formation. In a second step, we will also discuss how soil micromorphology (the microscopic study of archaeological soil/sediments) can help to understand the taphonomical history of the botanical components, observed within the dark earth; we will hereby focus on the example of the phytoliths (Devos et al., 2013; Vrydaghs et al., in press).References:Devos, Y., Nicosia, C., Vrydaghs, L., Modrie, S., 2013. Studying urban stratigraphy: Dark Earth and a microstratified sequence on the site of the Court of Hoogstraeten (Brussels, Belgium). Integrating archaeopedology and phytolith analysis. Quaternary International 315, 147-166. Nicosia C., Devos Y., 2014. Urban Dark Earth. In: Smith, C. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Vol. 11. Springer, New York, pp. 7532-7540 .Vrydaghs, L., Ball, T.B., Devos, Y., in press. Beyond redundancy and multiplicity. Integrating phytolith analysis and micromorphology to the study of Brussels Dark Earth, Journal of Archaeological Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. jas.2015.09.004