Climate induced temporal change in Sr-Nd isotope ratios in the valley-fill deposits of the Ganga river

New evidence of mid- to late- Holocene vegetation and climate change from a Neolithic settlement in western fringe of Central Ganga Plain: Implications for Neolithic to Historic phases

“…Archaeological sites can provide well-defined and discrete climatic signals in datable cultural contexts directly related to archaeological era (Sandweiss and Kelley, 2012). In an Indian context, various studies related to past climate and culture are available based on lacustrine sediments (Chauhan et al, 2004(Chauhan et al, , 2009(Chauhan et al, , 2015Farooqui et al, 2013;Prasad et al, 2014a;Prasad and Enzel, 2006;Saxena et al, 2013;Sharma et al, 2004aSharma et al, , 2006, soil carbonate nodules and soil organic matter (Agrawal et al, 2012(Agrawal et al, , 2013a(Agrawal et al, , 2013b(Agrawal et al, , 2014a(Agrawal et al, , 2014bBasu et al, 2015), fluvial landscapes (Giosan et al, 2012), marine sediments (Staubwasser et al, 2003) and isotopic studies of off shore sediments (Ponton et al, 2012) etc., but rarely obtained directly from the archaeological sites (Ghosh et al, 2013;Jha et al, 2020;Premathilake et al, 2017;Sharma et al, 2004b). Studies from Kota Cina, archaeological site in Indonesia and Iron age and Gallo-Roman archaeological sediments from Beaurieux Les Greves, France, are good example of documenting the evolution of vegetation and human influence from archaeological sediments (Chabot et al, 2018;Innes and Haselgrove, 2019).…”

“…Despite the Ganga Basin's wider geographical extent, rich archaeological archives (Figure 1a) the region has not yet received much attention, excepting a few studies, intending to reconstruct regional paleoclimate. Most of these were focussed on the palynological study of few lacustrine deposits (Chauhan et al, 2004(Chauhan et al, , 2009(Chauhan et al, , 2015(Chauhan et al, , 2018Wasson et al, 2013), stable isotopic investigation of soil carbonate nodules and soil organic matter (Agrawal et al, 2012(Agrawal et al, , 2013a(Agrawal et al, , 2013b(Agrawal et al, , 2014a(Agrawal et al, , 2014b, and a few multiproxy studies including lake sediments (Misra et al, 2020;Saxena et al, 2015;Saxena and Singh, 2017;Sharma et al, 2004a;Tripathi et al, 2017;Trivedi et al, 2013). The only available record from archaeological contexts is, an Oxygen isotope analysis of mammalian teeth from the archaeological sites of Kalli Pachchhim, Dadupur and Charda (Sharma et al, 2004b).…”