Palynology of Iron Age and Gallo-Roman archaeological sediments from Beaurieux Les Grèves, Aisne, France

Abstract

Pollen and non-pollen palynomorph analyses conducted on archaeological sediments from ditches and pits are used to investigate land use and vegetation history around the long-lived rural settlement of Beaurieux Les Grèves in the Aisne valley, Picardy, northern France. Samples were examined from successive phases spanning the 8 th century BC to the 3 rd century AD. Each phase showed evidence of agriculture and human impact on the environment. The earliest occupation was early Iron Age and the area around the site was shown to have been almost completely deforested and dominated by open ground and pasture. The later Iron Age supported mixed agriculture, probably with pasture around the site and cereal fields further away. In Gallo-Roman times there was mixed farming with considerable cereal cultivation, although the area around the site was mainly pasture or waste land. Late Gallo-Roman times saw a reduction in the scale of agricultural activity and some regeneration of natural heath and scrub vegetation. Coprophilous fungal spores are conspicuous and indicate the importance of animal husbandry on and around the site. The data from Beaurieux Les Grèves augment earlier analyses from settlements and natural deposits in the Aisne valley in suggesting almost complete deforestation for agricultural land use within the valley bottom, although some woodland undoubtedly survived on the steeper valley sides and nearby plateaux. It agrees with the pollen evidence from the wider region of northeastern France that clearance of Fagus-dominated woodland for mixed agriculture in late Iron Age and Gallo-Roman times, and increasingly for arable cultivation, transformed the regional vegetation to one of partly wooded but mainly open character.

Dark Ages woodland recovery and the expansion of beech: a study of land use changes and related woodland dynamics during the Roman to Medieval transition period in northern Belgium

“…Finally, this paper also adds to the growing number of studies that demonstrate the value of pollen analysis of on-site archaeological features for the reconstruction of local vegetation dynamics (e.g. Pokorný et al, 2006;Groenewoudt et al, 2007;Halvorsen & Hjelle, 2017;Innes & Haselgrove, 2019). Especially in regions with no natural deposits such as peat bogs or lakes, which are traditionally used as sedimentary archives for vegetation reconstructions, these can be an alternative.…”

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

“…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). Recent studies from Quaternary fluvial sequences of the Belan river in north-central India suggest climate-driven shifts in population density or local migration of prehistoric humans during the Middle Palaeolithic to Early Neolithic phase (Jha et al, 2020).…”