The past in dust: current trends and future directions in Pleistocene geoarcheology of European loess

Abstract

Loess is a main archive of Pleistocene landscapes and environments and therefore has an important connection to the preservation and interpretation of Paleolithic sites. In Europe, anthropogenic sites have been found in loess because of past local occupation. At one extreme, sites are well preserved with minimal disturbance often accompanied by embedded proxies to estimate ecological parameters. On the other hand, loess deposits have undergone post‐depositional alterations such as weathering, pedogenesis or bioturbation due to changing environmental conditions or other disturbances that obscure anthropogenic sites. We outline the current state of research and connections between Paleolithic archeology and loess research while introducing a series of subsequent regional case studies as part of a special issue. We also make recommendations for future work to incorporate a wider variety of methods to create more robust inferences on hominin and environmental evolution and their connections.

The loess landscapes of the Lower Rhine Embayment as (geo-)archeological archives – insights and challenges from a geomorphological and sedimentological perspective

“…Loess is one of the main terrestrial archives of Pleistocene landscapes and environments and therefore has an important connection to the preservation and interpretation of Paleolithic sites (Chu and Nett, 2021). These authors summarized the current trends and future directions in Pleistocene geoarcheology of European loess.…”

“…In the last few decades, interest in geoarcheology among geoscientists has grown, leading to increased collaboration between archeologists and geoscientists in loess research (Chu and Nett, 2021). Pioneering studies in the 1980s and 1990s inter alia integrated stratigraphic, sedimentological and archeological data from the southern Limburg (the Netherlands) to reconstruct Middle to Late Pleistocene environments and human behavior (van Kolfschoten and Roebroeks, 1985;Vandenberghe et al, 1993).…”