Historical land-use in an abandoned mountain village in the Czech Republic is reflected by the Mg, P, K, Ca, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, Rb, Zr, and Sr content in contemporary soils
Introduction
Human settlement activities are connected with the accumulation and depletion of many elements in soils and sediments (Rapp and Hill, 2006, Fenger-Nielsen et al., 2019). In archaeological studies, the most frequently used element for the identification of ancient settlement activities has been P so far because of its relatively low mobility in ecosystems and high accumulation rates in comparison to many other elements (Arrhenius, 1934, Bethell and Máté, 1989, Holliday and Gartner, 2007). Using portable XRF (pXRF), the total contents of many elements heavier than Mg can be easily identified (Hunt and Speakman, 2015). From the previous research, we learned that ancient settlement activities are connected with the deposition of biomass ashes whose chemical signature can be identified by increased contents of P, K, Ca, Mg, S, Zn, and Cu in soils and sediments (Wilson et al., 2009, Hejcman et al., 2013a, Hájek et al., 2017, Šmejda et al., 2017). The question which has not yet been answered is how the categories of historical land-use in deserted mountain settlements are reflected in the elemental composition of contemporary soils. To study this question, we selected the deserted village Malonín (Bayer and Beneš, 2004, Houfková et al., 2015). This village is representative example of a medieval mountain village abandoned after the resettlement of German inhabitants from the former Czechoslovakia after the end of the World War II (WWII). The abandonment of villages in mountain agriculturally marginal areas was a large-scale phenomenon during that time as approximately 3 million Germans were resettled from the former Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948 (Kosinski, 1969, Spurný et al., 2016). The total number of inhabitants in Czechoslovakia was 14.5 million in 1930 so approximately each fifth inhabitant lost his/her home (Novotný et al., 2012). Although there were attempts to resettle abandoned villages by incoming Slavic inhabitants from the interior regions of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia and from other European countries like Romania, these attempts were in the majority of the cases unsuccessful and many villages completely disappeared.
Using pXRF, the chemical signatures of soils in several deserted medieval villages have been studied in the Czech Republic. Janovský and Horák (2018) studied the variability of soil conditions in the field system of the medieval village Hol abandoned at the end of the 15th century. The most visible enrichment by P, Mn, and Zn was recorded in former gardens and close to the relicts of buildings. Agricultural management on former fields was connected with P, Sr, Zn, and Mn enrichment probably due to manuring and the application of biomass ashes during the existence of the village. A similarly studied medieval village abandoned at the beginning of 16th century was Lovětín (Horák et al., 2018). The main elements reflecting human activities were Mn, Sr, Th, K, Zn, and P but their enrichment pattern was not clearly connected with the relicts of buildings. The study by Horák et al. (2018) was the first attempt to identify the soil quality and the methods of the medieval agricultural management.
According to our information, there has been no study of the impact of different types of historical land-use identified according to historical maps on the chemical signatures of soils in villages abandoned after WWII. We suppose that the chemical signatures of soils in such villages will be much stronger than the signatures recorded in previously studied villages abandoned in the 15th or 16th centuries. This is because of the long period of the settlement’s existence since medieval times, more intensive settlement activities, the short time since the abandonment of the villages, and therefore the better preservation of the original chemical signatures in soils. To test this hypothesis, we performed a detailed analysis of the soil chemical properties in relation to the historical land-use pattern in the deserted village Malonín.
Section snippets
Study site
The mountain village Malonín (120 km south of Prague, Fig. 1) was established in the Bohemian Forest Mountains in the second half of the 13th century AD (Houfková et al., 2015). The first written record comes from 1349 AD when the village had already been in existence for some time (Profous, 1951). There were no settlement activities before the establishment of the village (Beneš, 1995). According to local records (Chronicle of Frantoly, 1945–1954), 14 buildings and 2 remote settlements were
Results
Of the 24 elements determined by pXRF, only 3 elements (Mg, Cr, and Y) were determined in less than 50% of soil samples. Basic statistical description of the obtained data for the main elements in the A, B, and C horizons is given in Table 2.
Although the Mg and Cr contents were above the limit of detection only in 12 (13%) and 27 (29%) cases of the 93 samples, Mg and Cr enrichment was clearly connected with the settlement activities as the majority samples above the limit of detection for both
Discussion
Although the studied village was abandoned in the 1950s, the strong chemical signature is still well preserved in the studied soils. In many aspects, this chemical signature was much stronger than the signature recorded by Janovský and Horák (2018) in the medieval village Hol which existed 100 years at most and was deserted before 1437 (Klír and Beránek, 2012). It is clear that the intensity of the chemical signature is connected with the length of the settlement period and partly also with the
Conclusion
We asked how the categories of the historical land-use in the deserted mountain settlements are reflected in the elemental composition of contemporary soils. The previous human activities were connected not only with the usually interpreted elements such as P, Ca, Zn, and Cu, but also with the elements rarely used in archaeological studies such as Mg, K, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Ni, Rb, Zr, and Sr.
Settlement activities created strong chemical signatures which are much stronger than in the previously
Acknowledgements
MJ was financially supported by Charles University Grant Agency, project no. 130318, entitled “Fragile stability – subsistence of field systems in medieval Bohemia”, implemented at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. MJ was supported also by the Charles University Project Progress Q07, Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages. MH was supported by project IGA 20184218 of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences.
We thank Petra Houfková, Jiří Bumerl, Lukáš
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2023, CatenaCitation Excerpt :Such connections have been under investigation for a long time now, starting originally with studies on phosphate (Holliday and Gartner, 2007; Oonk et al., 2009; Salisbury, 2020). Multi-elemental approaches have been also often carried out (e.g. Entwistle et al., 1998, 2000; Wilson et al., 2008, 2009), however, only some studies took advantage of multi-variate analysis when dealing with multi-variable data (Horák and Klír, 2017; Horák et al., 2018; Janovský et al., 2020, 2022; Pîrnău et al., 2020; Salisbury, 2013, 2016). There is also the possibility to use specific statistical approaches to process geochemical data, tracing aspects of elemental composition (Filzmoser et al., 2018), but their application is quite rare in archaeological geochemistry (Horák et al., 2018; Danielisová et al., 2022).