A Multimethodological Approach for the Investigation of Archaeological Ditches – Exemplified by the Early Bronze Age Settlement of Fidvár Near Vráble (Slovakia)

Abstract

Buried or refilled archaeological ditches offer great opportunities in terms of reconstructing past human activities and human-nature interactions. The Early Bronze Age settlement of Fidvár in southwestern Slovakia offers excellent opportunities for this kind of geoarchaeological study. Based on previous magnetic prospection further geophysical, sedimentological and geochemical investigations were carried out focusing on the three existing semi-elliptical early Bronze Age ditches. Afterwards an appropriate assortment of methods was chosen and successfully applied to two of the ditches in order to reconstruct their lateral and vertical geometries. Alongside interesting archaeological outcomes for the Fidvár site our results highlight the advantageous combination of geophysical and geochemical data. Only this multimethodological approach allowed both a universal and precise reconstruction of the archaeological features.

Geophysical–Geochemical Reconstruction of Ancient Population Size – the Early Bronze Age Settlement of Fidvár (Slovakia)

“…For a detailed description of this, see Nowaczinski et al . (). Ditch A's geometry is based on two sediment cores as well as Točik's publication () and the excavations that occurred between 2008 and 2009 (Figure ).…”

“…Before the first human occupation, both Cambisols and Luvisols developed under the regional geological and climatic conditions (measured at 539 mm of precipitation and temperature 10.3 °C, 1951–2012 means; Van Engelen et al ., ). Due to long and intensive agricultural use, only remnants of the Holocene soils have been preserved beneath anthropogenic settlement layers at Fidvár, which range between 1 and 1.5 m in depth (Nowaczinski et al ., ). To protect the archaeological heritage from further destruction by agriculture, the settlement area was declared a historic monument in the summer of 2012 by the urban administration of Vráble.…”

“…In order to determine the total P input in the EBA, the bulk volume of archaeological sediment was determined. This was accomplished using the results of Nowaczinski et al (2012), a topographical dataset of the settlement area, representative electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) cross-sections for vertical delimitation of the settlement layers, excavation and percussion drilling. The last were additionally utilized in the determination of the material's P content by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy.…”

“…Since 2007, the site at Fidvár has been the subject of an interdisciplinary geo-archaeological project. The first scientific investigations in 1967 by Anton Točik (Figure 1) revealed sundry archaeological layers, representing at least three Bronze Age cultures (Hatvan, Unjetice, Mad'arovce), making this location a 'cultural melting-pot' (Točik, 1986;Bátora et al, 2009Bátora et al, , 2012Nowaczinski et al, 2012). Točik's excavation intersected two prehistoric ditches (A and B), which elliptically surrounded the supposed former centre of the village.…”

Geoarchaeological Core Prospection as a Tool to Validate Archaeological Interpretation Based on Geophysical Data at the Roman Settlement of Auritz/Burguete and Aurizberri/Espinal (Navarre)

“…In many cases, the sediment core sampling is used, together with archaeological trenches, to access to soil samples that are characterized to have complementary data or to analyse the interactions between soil physical properties and geophysical techniques (e.g., [19][20][21]). Indeed, the understanding of this interactions helps improving further interpretations.…”