Transcript - LongWood

Archaeological Data Management in an Interdisciplinary
Environment
Péter Szabó, Petr Kuneš, Jan Kolář, Helena Svitavská Svobodová, Jana Müllerová,
Eva Jamrichová, Radim Hédl
Institute of Botany, Czech Academy of Sciences, Brno and Průhonice, Czech Republic, [email protected]
THE LONGWOOD PROJECT (2012-2016)
Long-term woodland dynamics in Central Europe: from estimations to a realistic model
www.longwood.cz
 integrates ecological (palaeoecology, vegetation ecology) and historical (archaeology, history) data in a GIS environment
Study area: Moravia and Silesia (27 000
sq.km with more than 3500 settlements)
AIMS
 to construct a multidisciplinary geodatabase focusing on long-term (Neolithic to present) patterns of
woodland cover, structure, management and species composition
 to construct a spatio-temporal forest and landscape model based on the geodatabase to assess
changes in woodland and the main drivers of change
 to relate spatio-temporal dynamics of the tree canopy composition and structure to environmental
conditions and understorey herbaceous vegetation
 to compare the model and analytical results to approaches currently employed in forestry and nature
conservation and to contribute to better informed guidelines for conservation and management
Archaeological coverage: all available
records of human activities (living,
burying, mining etc.) in various forms of
community areas (settlement, burial
ground, quarry, pottery workshop, hillfort,
etc.)
from
the
Mesolithic-Neolithic
transition (ca. 7000 BC) to the 13th
century AD. Linked to parishes. The
database after the first year of the
project.
Historical coverage: archival records
on
forest
extent,
tree
species
composition, type of management,
abiotic disturbances etc. from the 12th
century AD to the present. Linked to
parishes. The database after the first year
of the project.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL
COVERAGE
PALYNOLOGICAL
COVERAGE
GEODATABASE
HISTORICAL
COVERAGE
woodland cover, species
composition and human
activities over the past 7500
years
Palynological
coverage:
existing
pollen stratigraphical data from the
PALYCZ database and ca. 20 new sites.
Point layer of the samples with metadata
attached as attributes. Information on
woodland cover as well as tree and herb
species composition throughout the
Holocene. The database after the first
year of the project.
ECOLOGICAL
COVERAGE
Plus external databases as GIS layers
COMPARISON AND INTEGRATION OF DATA ON THREE LEVELS
1. data – data (e.g. current oak distribution vs archival records on oak as a point layer)
2. model – data (e.g. REVEALS landscape model vs number of archaeological components)
3. model – model (e.g. kernel estimation based GIS reconstruction of 18th century forest composition vs
potential natural vegetation model vs LOVE vegetation model for the 18th century)
Ecological coverage: tree and herb
species composition. Historical forest
vegetation records from the 20th century
(stored in the database as point layers
with metadata as attributes) are
repeated to assess shifts in species
composition related to the abandonment
of traditional management. The database
after the first year of the project.
A PRELIMINARY EXAMPLE: landscape changes in southern Moravia
Increases in oak follow increases in
the
number
of
archaeological
components, suggesting that oak
might be dependent on management.
The pollen site and the source area of archaeological data
Data and methods:
1) We estimated regional vegetation composition and land-use types based on
pollen record from a lake basin using the REVEALS model. Five radiocarbon
dates served to obtain age-depth relationship for dating using smoothing
spline interpolation. Pollen counts within each 500-year interval were used to
run the model. The radius of the regional area was set to 25 km and wind
speed to 3 m.s-1 under neutral atmospheric conditions. Pollen productivity
estimates for 27 pollen taxa were selected according to model validation
against modern vegetation.
2) Archaeological data include all stratified finds and features within the area
(settlements, burial grounds, hoards, hillforts and specialized production
places and their fragments/parts). We excluded from the analysis all single
finds (e.g. coins, hammer-axes). Data come from the Archives of the
Archaeological Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno, which is
responsible for collecting information from all excavations in the region as well
as from published papers.
The
most
intense
phases
of
deforestation
correlate
with
the
introduction of large scale cereal
cultivation in the Roman Period and with
high-medieval colonization (the latter
known from written sources)
Despite considerable fluctuation in the number of archaeological components, the
forest/open land ratio is relatively stable from the Neolithic to the Roman Period.
Does this refer to the incomplete nature of the archaeological record or to differing
ways of landscape utilisation by variously-sized group that led to the same pattern of
landscape openness?
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC Grant
agreement no 278065