Analyses of pollen, plant macrofossils (seeds, fruits, wood and mosses), molluscs, diatoms and vertebrate (mainly fish) remains allowed a detailed reconstruction of a middle-Holocene alluvial forest and its associated hydrological conditions. The use of multiple proxies resulted in a taxonomically more detailed and environmentally more comprehensive understanding of terrestrial as well as aquatic habitats. The results demonstrate possible biases in palaeoecological reconstructions of alluvial and estuarine environments drawn from single proxies. Many locally occurring woody taxa were underrepresented or remained undetected by pollen analyses. Seeds and fruits also proved to be inadequate to detect several locally important taxa, such as Ulmus and Hedera helix. Apparently brackish conditions inferred from diatoms, pollen and other microfossils conflicted strikingly with the evidence from molluscs, fish bones and botanical macroremains which suggest a freshwater environment. Brackish sediment (and the microfossil indicators) is likely to have been deposited during spring tides or storm surges, when estuarine waters penetrated more inland than usual. Despite the reworking and deposition of estuarine and saltmarsh sediment well above the tidal node at such events, local salinity levels largely remained unaffected.

Inspired by archaeological finds from Kilise Tepe in southern Turkey, this paper explains how the internal structure of nacreous shell can indicate which type of shell was its source. Previous work in the biological sciences demonstrated that it is possible to distinguish between gastropods/cephalopods and bivalves by observing the arrangement of the aragonite tablets in the nacreous layer, and that the thickness of these tablets is fairly constant within taxa but can differ between them. This study verifies these properties by scanning electron microscopy on modern and ancient material, and discusses the benefit in the field of archaeology. The text is not the result of full-scale research but rather a proof of concept to explore the potential of the topic. It is shown that the difference between gastropods/cephalopods and bivalves can indeed be established by looking at the internal architecture of their mother-of-pearl, but that it is problematic to further discriminate between taxa. The thickness of the aragonite tablets is not a reliable distinctive feature. The microstructure of the overlying prismatic layer is a useful parameter when it is preserved.

In this study we draw attention to the inherent variability in the results of trial trenching, when taking into account the countless variations in orientation and positioning of trenches. Grids of trial trenches were simulated time and again on the excavation plans of 16 archaeological sites from Flanders, Belgium. Orientation and positioning of the grid layout was shifted randomly, whilst the area coverage varied from 2.5% to 80%. The intersection rates of the archaeological features allow to gain more insight in trends and variability that are inherent to the chosen design of trial trenches. It is assessed how robust a chosen grid layout performs on (multi-period) archaeological sites and how variable these results might be. The most effective layout appears to be a grid with short, parallel and discontinuous trenches or a standard grid, closely followed by 2 m wide continuous trenches. Implementing 4 m wide trenches reduces the effectiveness of the latter method substantially. When the area coverage of the trenches is below 10%, the results of the archaeological prospection become unreliable and can potentially lead to a substantial over-or underestimation of the actual feature density on the site. Figure 12. Comparison of the density plots of the number of features intersected applying continuous trenches of 2 m and 4 m wide, and two layouts of discontinuous parallel trenches, all with an area coverage C of 10%. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

In the summers of 1994–1998 a rescue excavation took place at Kilise Tepe, an archaeological site occupied from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, located in the Göksu valley in Cilicia in southern Turkey. This article analyses the shell finds from environmental and archaeological perspectives. Three categories of molluscs are identified: terrestrial, freshwater and marine. The first two are the remnants of local fauna that lived on or near the site; the marine shells came from the Mediterranean shore adjacent to the Göksu delta and the delta itself. There are indications that freshwater mussels served as tools. Marine shells were worn as ornaments.

Enlighten -Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 95O ur first programme of excavations at Kilise Tepe in the 1990s recovered evidence for settlement at the site over a succession of periods from the Early Bronze Age to the Byzantine. This gave us snapshots of the architecture and artefactual repertoire of the site at different times, and while these were similar to the material record of other settlements, indicating that Kilise Tepe participated culturally with neighbouring regions ( fig. 1), the similarities were not always with the same part of the region, and this of course raised the question of why the AbstractThe excavations at Kilise Tepe in the 1990s inevitably left a range of research questions unanswered, and our second spell of work at the site from 2007 to 2011 sought to address some of these, relating to the later second and early first millennia. This article gathers the architectural and stratigraphic results of the renewed excavations, presenting the fresh information about the layout and character of the Late Bronze Age North-West Building and the initial phases of the Stele Building which succeeded it, including probable symbolic practices, and describing the complex stratigraphic sequence in the Central Strip sounding which covers the lapse of time from the 12th down to the seventh century. There follow short reports on the analyses of the botanical and faunal materials recovered, a summary of the results from the relevant radiocarbon dating samples and separate studies addressing issues resulting from the continuing study of the ceramics from the different contexts. Taken together, a complex picture emerges of changes in settlement layout, architectural traditions, use of external space, artefact production and subsistence strategies during the centuries which separate the Level III Late Bronze Age settlement from the latest Iron Age occupation around 700 BC.