Mid‐ to Late Holocene landscape dynamics and rural settlement in the uplands of northern Bavaria, Germany

Abstract

We present results from a systematic interdisciplinary study on (pre‐)historic rural settlement and landscape development in an upland region of northern Bavaria, Germany. The archaeological and geoarchaeological investigations—supported by radiocarbon dating, optically stimulated luminescence dating, and palaeoecological analysis—were performed to (i) identify so far unknown prehistoric rural settlement sites, (ii) determine site‐specific soil erosion from colluvial deposits, and (iii) assess the composition of woodland from on‐ and offsite charcoal finds. The earliest indicators of human activities from the Younger Neolithic (late 5th to early 4th millennium B.C.E.) come from colluvial deposits. Our investigations, for the first time, show Middle to Late Bronze Age (ca. 1400–800 B.C.E.), permanent rural settlement in a German central upland region, with a peak in the Late Bronze Age. Due to the varying thicknesses of Bronze Age colluvial deposits, we assume land use practices to have triggered soil erosion. From the spectrum of wood species, Maloideae, ash, and birch are regarded as successional indicators after fire clearance in that period. Settlement continued until the 5th century B.C.E. After a hiatus of 500 years, it re‐flourished in the Late Roman and Migration periods (mid‐3rd–5th century C.E.) and went on in the Medieval period.

Long-term Rural Settlement Continuity and Land Use during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Northern Franconian Low Mountain Range

“…Only a few bones and some teeth of cattle (142 g), pig (67 g), sheep/goat (37 g), and dog (7 g) could be recovered in some, mostly Late Bronze Age, features on the Görauer Anger. A similar bone spectrum is also found in a single Urnfield-period storage pit (Kothieringer et al, 2023: 16). The even rarer bones of wild animals come from red or roe deer (19 g) and brown hare (1 g).…”

“…A combination of social and economic factors led to a kind of collapse in Early Bronze Age societies in many European regions (Kneisel, 2012: 274-77;Müller, 2013: 533-36). In the northern Bavarian region considered here, the number of sites then increases again from the middle of the fifteenth century BC (Berger, 1984), and, around 1300 BC, a shift in the settlement pattern from valley locations to the Alb plateaus occurs, apparently due to a deterioration in climatic conditions (Seregély, 2013;Breitenbach et al, 2019;Kothieringer et al, 2023). Some irregularly shaped pits found at the site of Weiden-Winkel were probably used for clay extraction and quickly backfilled afterwards.…”

“…In the first part of an interdisciplinary research project (2015-2018, a cooperation between the universities of Bamberg, Giessen, and Leiden), we combined archaeological and geoarchaeological methods in order to locate and verify the presence of rural settlements of the Metal Ages on the plateaus, and to gain first indications of associated land use activities (Kothieringer et al, 2018(Kothieringer et al, , 2023.…”