Aayush Srivastava

Human-environment interactions are most prevalent at the margins of the human habitat. In semi-arid and arid regions these interactions are shaped above all by the availability of water. In the Hajar Mountains (spanning across the United Arab Emirates and Oman) people employ falaj (ground water extraction) and oasis systems, as well as surface water management, including terracing. The history of these practices is not well known as archaeological evidence is difficult to date. This paper provides the first luminescence dating and geoarchaeological analysis of terraces in the UAE Hajar Mountains, at Suhaila 2 (Hatta). OSL profiling and dating, combined with particle size analysis, phytolith investigations and hydrological modelling indicate that the terraces at Suhaila 2 were constructed from at least the mid 13th century CE. Phases of subsequent use date to the 15/16th and 19th century CE, consistent with independent archaeological evidence and coinciding with regionally wetter climatic intervals. Particle size analysis and phytolith assemblages confirm that the terraces successfully retained runoff water and supported crop cultivation, including Pooideae grasses (wheat, barley, or rye) and possibly date palm. Hydrological modelling shows that terracing increased effective water availability through runoff five- to fifty-fold. Automated terrace detection reveals that terrace systems are found across the UAE Hajar Mountains demonstrating that this form of land-use was a landscape-scale strategy rather than a site-specific phenomenon. Together, these results establish terracing as a significant but underexplored record of human adaptation to climate variability in southeastern Arabia, with implications for understanding late Holocene land-use history across the wider region.

The freshwater environments of the Eemian are well documented, although mostly focussed on lakes. Here, we present results from lake sediments of dark grey, laminated, organic‐rich medium sand, on top of very dark grey gyttja at the site of Ejstrup, west of Kolding, Denmark. Based on pollen counts, the sediments were biostratigraphically classified as mid‐Eemian. Despite the lake deposition, the assemblage of aquatic insect subfossils clearly indicates a river environment. The aquatic assemblage was rich, including five beetle taxa, 23 caddisfly taxa and 29 taxa of dipterans (non‐biting midges, blackflies and brine flies). Specifically, analyses of the species' habitat traits point to a 15–25 m wide river, likely a tributary to a lake. This lowland river was likely fast‐flowing, and meandering, with a sequence of riffle areas containing boulders, stones and gravel, separated by areas of sand, and bordered by silty/muddy areas along the banks. Furthermore, the riverbed may have contained a large amount of submerged dead wood but only sparse vegetation, due to an overall dense riparian canopy dominated by Carpinus betulus , Corylus avellana and Alnus sp. Based on the Trichoptera species, we reconstruct a mid‐Eemian July mean air temperature of 18.1°C, that is, 1.2°C higher than the 1991–2020 average. The Eemian river environment, assumed to be unaffected by human influence, may serve as a useful reference for the present‐day restoration of heavily anthropogenically impacted Danish and European rivers.

The repurposing of earlier sites and monuments is an enduringly popular theme in early medieval archaeology, but in England it has attracted little interest among Late Saxon and early post‐Conquest studies. From the tenth century, however, an increasingly prevalent pattern is discernible of secular lords locating their power centres in relation to earlier features. A variety of evidence for such correlations is presented here, demonstrating reuse as an explicit strategy of aspirant lords who developed their private complexes with reference to a wide range of prehistoric, Roman, and earlier medieval antecedents. It is argued that the tumultuous political conditions around the turn of the first millennium intensified elite engagement with material signatures of the past, which they curated in efforts to shape collective memory and buttress their authority.

This study employs Optically Stimulated Luminescence Profiling and Dating (OSL-PD) to address the challenge of synchronizing social changes with natural events, a significant limitation in existing studies on the resilience and vulnerability of pre-modern societies to ecological stress. By uncovering the construction dates of terrace farming systems in the northern Apennines region, the research reveals a distinct temporal framework, indicating that the establishment of agricultural terraces predominantly occurred during the 11th to 13th centuries CE. This crucial time frame aligns directly with complex socio-economic factors, including the encastellation process, alongside the climatic shifts characterising the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Isotopic fractionation of the Total Organic Carbon confirms that different agricultural choices were made in coincidence with the establishment of terrace farming. The resultant historical rural landscape underwent continuous enhancements in the centuries that followed. Notably, the main phases of (re)construction correspond to the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age, offering new insights into the historical interactions between human activities and the environment during the Late Holocene in the area.

This article presents an interdisciplinary programme for research on historic landscapes that has emerged since 2020 in the framework of the project Terraces as Sustainable Agricultural Environments (‘TerraSAgE’). While the methodology has been tested in specific Mediterranean case studies, it is also applicable in other locations and regions. Our integrated approach provides new insights into the development of terraced agrarian landscapes and the changing dynamics in land management. It can provide knowledge of the extent to which past change has influenced present‐day landscapes and has implications for the development of sustainable landscape practices. The research framework proposed here has been tested through case studies in different landscape types across southern Europe, including small‐scale mixed farming landscapes of the Aegean islands (Naxos, Greece); terraces for vines and olives (Pelješac, Croatia); a landscape of dairy production (northern Apennines, Italy), which was until quite recently agroforestry; modern cereal cultivation (around Els Prats de Rei, Catalonia, Spain); upland irrigated landscapes on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada (Andalucia, Spain) and mixed farming in a wooded Atlantic environment (Galicia, Spain).

Agricultural terraces provide farmers in hilly landscapes with effective ways to increase the area available for crops. They mitigate the risks of soil erosion and promote crop productivity by slowing surface water runoff and retaining moisture. As in other parts of the world, terraces have been constructed and used in the Mediterranean for millennia. The availability of terraced agriculture had important socio-economic, ecological, and environmental implications for past societies. However, the chronology of construction, use, and abandonment of terraces in different regions remains uncertain. A more robust set of chronological data will allow better assessment of whether terrace agriculture was a resilient strategy in the face of past economic or ecological instability and, in turn, inform how terraces could be used to address future agricultural and environmental challenges. In this paper, we review the application of luminescence dating to terrace sediments, the key challenges involved, and the currently published data which include over 250 luminescence ages. We also discuss the use of a multidisciplinary approach involving other geoarchaeological tools (e.g., use of GIS analyses, field-based luminescence readers, and micromorphology) to enhance the ways that past terrace systems can be understood. Terrace systems are inextricably linked to sustainable land use across the Mediterranean. Luminescence dating methods, therefore, have a crucial role to play in understanding the complexities of past and future landscape change.

Ruddons Point, on the Firth of Forth coastline, Scotland, is a laterally extensive terrace of glacial and marine sediment deposits raised above current sea-level, situated near to Kincraig Point, a key site that records a series of stepped erosional platforms carved into the local bedrock, interpreted as post Last Glacial Maximum palaeoshorelines. The deposits at Ruddons Point continue inland, with exposures of the raised sands and gravels cut by the local river, the Cocklemill Burn. The site provides an opportunity to examine the depositional history through the Late Devensian and Holocene. Geophysical survey aided in interpreting characteristics of subsurface sediments such as the transition between the younger saltmarsh sediments and older underlying sands and clays below, which slope in a northerly direction. A chronology obtained through optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating spans from c. 29 ka for sands and clays at an elevation of −0.66 mOD to surface windblown sands at c. 9.2 ka, formed prior to the Main Postglacial Transgression. Dating of inland raised marine deposits along the Cocklemill Burn records dates ranging from c. 8.9 to c. 4.3 ka. The raised marine deposits of Ruddons Point range from c. 8.1 to c. 2.9 ka, deposited unconformably on glacial tills and clays. This multidisciplinary field study builds depositional scenarios utilizing two dating methods, spanning the last c. 29 ka, to better understand coastal evolution for a region which has experienced complex relative sea-level variations. Supplementary material : Supplementary data related to this research article is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6080999 Thematic collection: This article is part of the Early Career Research collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/topic/collections/early-career-research

The Thar Desert dune system in north‐west India and eastern Pakistan provides a rich archive of past environmental, geomorphological and climatic change. Much of the knowledge about the timing of dune accumulation in the Thar stems from scattered and sporadic records, based on older luminescence dating protocols. If the Thar dune record is to be incorporated within a growing multiproxy framework of past climate and environmental dynamics, it is necessary to generate a systematic record of the timing of dunefield accumulation. From this, relationships to climate and other drivers of dune activity may then be better established. To this end, an intensive programme of field sampling and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating was carried out from a dunefield in the east‐central Thar Desert. This study presents the first detailed Holocene dune accumulation history from the region, and sheds light on the development of the multi‐generational parabolic dune systems. In contrast to previously published work, we identify the importance of the Holocene and the last millennium as periods with a number of preserved accumulation phases. OSL ages suggest that accumulation was persistent during the early and mid‐Holocene (within 11.7‐5.5 ka), late Holocene (2‐1 ka), as well as two major phases in the last millennium (600 – 200 a and within the last 70 a). Potential drivers of dune mobility in the last century include a strong anthropogenic dimension. Rapid net accumulation is recorded in the last 70 years, with rates varying between 2 and 5 m/year, in an environment where agricultural pressures have increased dramatically with the advent of irrigation schemes expanding into dunefield areas. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.