Past human impact in a mountain forest: geoarchaeology of a medieval glass production and charcoal hearth site in the Erzgebirge, Germany

Abstract

Since the twelfth century, forest areas in the upper reaches of the low mountain ranges of central Europe provided an important source of wood and charcoal especially for mining and smelting as well as glass production. In this case study from a site in the upper Erzgebirge region (Ore Mountains), results from archeological, geophysical, pedo-sedimentological, geochemical, However, although glass production is generally assumed to have caused intensive deforestation, the impact on this site appears rather weak compared to the sixteenth century onwards, when charcoal production, probably associated with emerging mining activities in the region, became important.Local deforestation and soil erosion has been associated mainly with this later phase of charcoal production and may indicate that the human impact of glass production is sometimes overestimated.

A modified Mask region‐based convolutional neural network approach for the automated detection of archaeological sites on high‐resolution light detection and ranging‐derived digital elevation models in the North German Lowland

“…In recent years, small anthropogenic landforms, that is, so-called relict charcoal hearths (RCHs, sometimes also called charcoalburning platforms or kilns), which are mainly found in forests and result from historical charcoal production, have attracted the attention of archaeologists and soil scientists in the North German Lowland (Raab et al, 2015). RCHs are part of landscapes, the so-called sociocultural fingerprint (Tarolli et al, 2019), and an important source of anthracological information (Gocel-Chaltè et al, 2020;Smidt et al, 2017), providing insight into historical land use practices (e.g., Tolksdorf et al, 2020;Deforce et al, 2020).…”

An initiative for a morphologic‐genetic catalog of relict charcoal hearths from Central Europe

“…Slope platform RCHs with a leveled surface are frequently reported for the Lower Mountain Ranges of Central Europe (Ludemann & Nelle, 2002; Stolz & Grunert, 2010), and their stratigraphy has been described in detail in Bavaria and the United States (T. Raab et al, 2017; Schneider et al, 2018a). Slope platform RCHs with (semi‐)circular ridges are present in the Ore Mountains and the Harz Mountains in Germany (Swieder, 2019; Tolksdorf et al, 2020). Like type 2c RCHs, the RCH platform with (semi‐)circular ridges are found in the Harz Mountains and in the Ore Mountains where hard bedrock exists.…”

“…Circular RCHs are often found on sites with solid bedrock where the construction of a ditch would have been too laborious. Circular RCHs on slopes over bedrock, and with a ridge around the platform (type 3c), are reported for the Ore mountains (Tolksdorf et al, 2020) and the Harz mountains in Germany (Swieder, 2019). The topsoil on the platform of type 3c RCHs often contains minor amounts of burnt substrate or charcoal, likely because most charred residues would have been raked out during charcoal removal.…”

Colluvial sediments originating from past land-use activities in the Erzgebirge Mountains, Central Europe: occurrence, properties, and historic environmental implications

“…A geomagnetic survey identified at least three glass kilns (Křivánek 1995). A reinvestigation of the site was performed in 2016-2017, detecting sedimentary sequences with colluvial, alluvial, and peat sediments (Tolksdorf et al 2020a).…”

“…How this development affected the local vegetation, relief and soils have been studied in detail for Niederpöbel (Tolksdorf et al 2015) and Oberpöbel-Vorderer Grünwald (Tolksdorf 2018). Further, glass kilns were established in the upper reaches of Erzgebirge during the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries AD (Kirsche 2003;Černá 2016), but they seem to have affected the local land cover (vegetation) as well as relief and soil far less than later mining and charcoal production as illustrated by a case study at Ullersdorf (Tolksdorf et al 2020a).…”