Making the Most of Soils in Archaeology
Archaeological sediments serve as an archive of human activity and environmental conditions through their physical and chemical properties as well as captured biological traces. Archaeologists have wanted to extract information from soils at archaeological excavations for decades, but sufficient technological developments and diversification of approaches have appeared only recently. This workshop brings together a range of specialists to introduce cutting-edge approaches to analyzing soils and sediments. The papers address soil formation and erosion processes at archaeological sites, analytical approaches through micro-morphology, geochemistry, micro-archaeology and multi-proxy analysis, as well as the analysis of lipid bio-markers, proteins and ancient DNA in soil.
This workshop will explore how innovative methods can be used in conjunction to complement each other, and how knowledge of their range of applications can encourage archaeologists to ask new questions and generate different hypotheses in an interdisciplinary research framework.
The aim of the workshop is to develop best practice recommendations for soil sampling strategies at today’s excavations to safeguard its information value about past human life for future generations.
Programme
All times Central European
| 9:00–9:15 | Welcome (Barbara Horejs, Julia Budka) |
| 9:15–9:30 | Introduction (Kerstin Kowarik, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Roderick B. Salisbury) |
| 9:30–10:00 | Erich Draganits: Sedimentation, erosion and water management: Geoarchaeology in the context of the ancient salt mine of Chehrābād (Iran) |
| 10:00–10:30 | Susanna Cereda: Keep it clean: a microstratigraphic approach to the study of built space, maintenance practices and concepts of cleanliness |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee break |
| 11:00–11:30 | Roderick B. Salisbury: Archaeological soil chemistry for spatial organization and activity area analyses |
| 11:30–12:00 | Steffen Schneider: Soils in archaeological landscape reconstruction: Challenge – Geoarchive – Archaeological site |
| 12:00–13:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00–13:30 | Ian Bull: Digging the dirt on soil biomarkers |
| 13:30–14:00 | Elena I. Zavala et al.: Preservation of Ancient DNA in Pleistocene sediments |
| 15:00–15:30 | Coffee break |
| 14:30–15:00 | Katharina Dulias: Digging Deep – How Ancient DNA and Palaeoproteomics Can Change the Game |
| 15:00–15:30 | Discussion & Conclusion |