Throughout mankind's history, the need to secure and protect the home settlement was an essential one. This holds especially true for the city of Ainos (modern Enez) in Turkish Thrace. Due to its continuous settlement history since the 7th/6th century BC, several different types of city walls were built-sometimes even on top of each other-several of which have been preserved over time. To decipher the construction style, the course and the age of a buried city wall segment in the southern part of the former city, a geoscientific multi-proxy approach including magnetic gradiometer (MG) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) measurements in combination with granulometrical, sedimentological and microfaunistical investigations on sediment cores was applied. We were able to (1) present reasonable arguments for its Hellenistic age; (2) reveal the course of this wall segment and extrapolate it further north into a less studied area; and (3) demonstrate that in this near-coastal area, the former swampy terrain had been consolidated for constructing the wall. Our multi-proxy approach serves as a valuable example for investigating buried structures in archaeological contexts, avoiding a less-economical, time-consuming, or even forbidden excavation.They were primarily erected to provide security for the settlers and to give shelter in troubled times for the people living nearby. Additionally, they were an object of the city's representation, its power, and wealth. City gates, especially, were often decorated by rich ornaments to impress incoming guests. Fortifications counted among the biggest and most expensive building projects of communities. Due to their massive construction, ancient city walls, or at least parts of them, have survived at many sites until today. As important hints with regard to the historical and cultural evolution of civilizations, they are still the focus of current research [1][2][3][4].Chronology presents a huge problem when studying the history, construction, and utilisation of ancient city walls-especially of buried or partly ruined ones. Common dating methods are based on the investigation of their dimensions, especially width and course, gateways and towers, masonry style, as well as integrated pottery, inscriptions and spolia used [2].By applying a multi-proxy approach, this paper presents the results of a geoarchaeological, geophysical, microfaunal, and geochronological research on the buried part of the city wall in the south-western part of Ainos in order to (1) verify its construction style and age; (2) prove its further extension in less-studied and difficult-to-access areas; and (3) decipher the general landscape evolution in this part of the city during the past 5000 years. This approach has been widely adopted in Mediterranean coastal studies e.g., [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] to investigate lateral and vertical changes in the sediment stratigraphy and to probe the evolution of the landscape, notably coastline migration. Furthermore, Elaia [22],...

Abstract. Gypsum-rich material covers the hillslopes above ∼ 1000 m of the Atacama and forms the particular landscape. In this contribution, we evaluate random forest-based analysis in order to predict the gypsum distribution in a specific area of ∼ 3000 km2, located in the hyperarid core of the Atacama. Therefore, three different sets of input variables were chosen. These variables reflect the different factors forming soil properties, according to digital soil mapping. The variables are derived from indices based on imagery of the ASTER and Landsat-8 satellite, geomorphometric parameters based on the Tandem-X World DEM™, as well as selected climate variables and geologic units. These three different models were used to evaluate the Ca-content derived from soil surface samples, reflecting gypsum content. All three different models derived high values of explained variation (r2 > 0.886), the RMSE is ∼ 4500 mg∙kg−1 and the NRMSE is ∼ 6%. Overall, this approach shows promising results in order to derive a gypsum content prediction for the whole Atacama. However, further investigation on the independent variables need to be conducted. In this case, the ferric oxides index (representing magnetite content), slope and a temperature gradient are the most important factors for predicting gypsum content.

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