Session: #604

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Wetlands have always attracted people due to a wide range of valuable services, eg. resources like food and water, high fertility, diversity of habitats, safety, transportation on the water, buffering of extreme weather conditions, scenic beauty etc. Since prehistory, human activity focused on the edges of water, and wetland settlements can be found throughout all archaeological periods. However, dwelling on the shore also held its risks. These highly dynamic environments could lead to flooding or be a potential source of diseases and could severely test the resilience of its inhabitants. Rising water levels are also one of the ways in which climate change most evidently manifests itself and are often argued as one of the reasons for settlement abandonment.
The changing water levels would leave traces in the archaeological sediments, which can be used to assess human responses to the changing environment. In this session, we are trying to interpret and disentangle these traces using multiple proxies like micromorphology, botanical macro- and microremains, zoological remains etc. from on-site archaeological analyses, ideally in interdisciplinary combinations. In this way, we hope to tackle the following research questions: Can we detect flooding episodes before water-level changes take place? How did people react to these episodes in the past? How do water-level changes affect the site preservation and formation processes? Can we define combinations of indicators for flooding events?

wetland archaeology, formation processes, multi-proxy-approach

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Dr. Bigna Steiner (France) ¹

Dr. Ferran Antolín (Switzerland) ²
PD Dr. Renate Ebersbach (Germany) ³