Terraced landscapes are important to the cultural and environmental characteristics of many regions worldwide. Accurate and comprehensive documentation of these landscapes is challenging, especially ...when inventorying dry-stone walled terraced landscapes and abandoned agricultural terraces. Even inventory methods based on LIDAR and fieldwork do not capture all of the mapped information. To address this challenge, the study proposed the inclusion of additional data sources into the inventory process, specifically aerial photographs from drones and photographs taken with advanced GPS devices. The combination of already-tested methods and other data sources enabled a more comprehensive and accurate inventory process. The improved methodology was tested in three cadastral municipalities of the Vipava Valley (Črniče, Gojače and Vrtovin), where the terraces have predominantly dry-stone risers with different heights. A large percentage of the terraced landscape in the selected cadastral municipalities is abandoned, so the terraced structures are overgrown by vegetation and forest; in Gojače, almost half of the terraced landscape is like this. In some places, the terraced landscape has become almost completely unrecognizable. With an improved inventory methodology, both active and abandoned agricultural terraces can be mapped.
Located in the arid basalt desert of northeastern Jordan, the settlement of Jawa is by far the largest and best-preserved archaeological site in the region. The Early Bronze Age (EBA) settlement ...phase of Jawa (3500–3000 BCE) is characterized by a highly sophisticated water storage system made of a series of pools, dams, and canals. In addition, recent archaeological and geoarchaeological surveys have uncovered agricultural terrace systems in the nearby vicinity.
In this study, four of these runoff terrace systems were investigated by detailed mapping. Additionally, thirteen sediment profiles from inside and outside the terrace systems were recorded and sampled. The examined samples were analyzed for bulk chemistry, texture, phytoliths, diatoms, and dung spherulites to supply information on the environmental and depositional conditions. The terrace systems were dated using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).
Ancient terrace agriculture was practiced on slopes, small plateaus, and valleys close to Jawa through the use of surface canals, which collected and diverted floodwater from nearby wadis or runoff from adjacent slopes. The terraced fields were usually arranged in cascades and comprised a system of risers, canals, and spillways. The terrace fills investigated yield OSL ages of around 3300 BCE, indicating that the terraces were constructed in the Early Bronze Age. The terrace fill sequences are composed of mixed unstratified fine sediments of local origin, reflecting low-energy fluvial deposition regimes. The phytolith record is dominated by Pooid grasses that include the most common Near Eastern cereals, such as wheat and barley. Increased phytolith concentrations in terrace fill sediments, as compared to samples from non-terrace deposits nearby, suggest increased plant growth and water availability within the terraces. Whether the terrace systems were used for growing food crops only or whether they were additionally used for grazing cannot be ascertained. Overall, quantitative phytolith analyses in arid environments are well suited to investigate temporal and spatial distributions of plant microfossil concentrations and their relation to human activity or paleoenvironmental conditions.
•Surface runoff and erosion were analysed using a portable rainfall simulator.•Surface runoff is land use-related.•Surface runoff and infiltration capacity are influenced by soil water ...repellency.•Only on abandoned terraces, surface runoff causes a strong increase in soil erosion.•Abandoned terraces are instable due to the increase in soil erosion susceptibility.
In mountain regions, soil landscapes are highly vulnerable against soil loss. Moreover, these environments are particularly affected by land use changes, which influence soil properties and related processes like surface runoff generation and soil erosion. These processes are in turn amplified by extreme climatic events and intensive geomorphological dynamics. The objective of this study is to quantitatively assess the effects of land use changes on surface runoff and soil erosion in a southern Alpine valley (Onsernone valley, Switzerland) characterized by a former intense land use followed by a progressive abandonment in the last decades. Surface runoff and related sediment transport has been analysed under controlled and reproducible conditions using a portable rainfall simulator device (1 m2). The results show a statistically significant increase in surface runoff when the soil gets water repellent reducing the surface infiltration capacity and generating preferential flow paths, which prevent a homogeneous wetting of the soil. However, the documented high sensitivity of surface runoff to land use changes does not result in an equally high sensitivity to soil erosion processes. Instead, soils display a high aggregate stability leading to very low sediment transports except for abandoned and reforested agricultural terraces. There, the lack of maintenance and progressive collapse of terrace dry walls locally increase slope angles and directly exposes the soil to atmospheric agents and surface runoff, which causes soil erosion rates beyond the customary natural level.
The history of agricultural terraces remains poorly understood due to problems in dating their construction and use. This has hampered broader research on their significance, limiting knowledge of ...past agricultural practices and the long-term investment choices of rural communities. The authors apply OSL profiling and dating to the sediments associated with agricultural terraces across the Mediterranean region to date their construction and use. Results from five widely dispersed case studies reveal that although many terraces were used in the first millennium AD, the most intensive episodes of terrace-building occurred during the later Middle Ages (c. AD 1100–1600). This innovative approach provides the first large-scale evidence for both the longevity and medieval intensification of Mediterranean terraces.
In this study rare earth elements (REE) signatures (REE ratios, cerium and europium anomalies) are applied to a complex soil stratigraphic sequence from the site of Konso, Ethiopia, with the aim of ...determining whether REE can distinguish the strata observed in the field. Forty soil samples were taken from a depositional sequence that includes overlapping human induced and ‘natural’ erosional and depositional processes. The samples were analysed by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) to determine trace elements and REE, with concentrations of major elements determined using X-ray fluorescence (XRF). Cluster Analyses (CA) were used to observe differences between strata. The mechanisms that influenced REE values and fractionations were related to OM accumulation, pyrogenic SOM, redox and secondary CaCO3 precipitation, suggesting the addition of proxies to the REE, Sc and Y data processing. This produced a clustering of samples that more accurately reflected the stratigraphic field observations. It is expected that this approach, combining the analysis of REE concentrations with an understanding of the mechanisms driving them in a given site or profile, will be replicable for other stratigraphic sequences. The results demonstrate that REE signatures are not just able to detect stratigraphic differences defined through field observations but also highlight variations within the same deposits. REE analysis could therefore become a powerful geoarchaeological tool, even for studies of complex stratigraphies.
•REE can discern different archaeological strata, even for complex soil stratigraphies.•REE methodological approach is applied for the first time to Konso UNESCO site.•Combining REE with known drivers accurately matches deposits defined by excavation•REE could have a significant role for interpretation of archaeological stratigraphy
Watchtowers, also called huts, manatir, qussur, ezab, araaiesh, siear, are architectural structures built of drystone without mortar overlooking the cultivated lands. They contribute to the ultimate ...formation of a unique cultural landscape evolved from the proper adaptation of land for agriculture using special systemisation, and to the inscription of the site named: 'Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines, Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem on the World Heritage List' (WHL). The inappropriate state of conservation of the watchtowers, among other factors, resulted in causing the whole property to be on the UNESCO's WHL in-danger since 2014 until the present. This research documented fifty watchtowers out of approximately 259 distributed over 13 square kilometres within the World Heritage Property (WHP). It also included a practical conservation project for twenty watchtowers selected upon a scientific multi-disciplinary approach after a field survey, literature review, assessment of previous conservation interventions, and direct observations based on the international related guidelines. The project succeeded in the conservation of twenty watchtowers and the revitalisation of the lands associated with them. The results of the project were investigated in terms of the commitment of conservation rules in particular: Documentation, Reversibility, Authenticity, Distinguishability, Adaptive reuse, Cultural Landscape, and Human Dimension.
Agricultural terraces are important for agricultural production and soil-and-water conservation. They comprise treads and risers that require manual construction and maintenance. If managed ...improperly, risers will collapse, causing soil loss, gully erosion, and cultivation threats. However, mapping terrace risers remains a challenge. This study presents a novel approach to automatically map terrace risers by combining remote sensing images and digital elevation models (DEMs). First, a terraced hillslope was extracted via a hill-shading method and edges in the image were detected using a Canny edge detector. Next, the DEM was used to generate the contour direction, and edges along this direction were searched and coded as candidate terrace risers via directional detection. Finally, the results of directional detection and the edge image obtained from the Canny detector were overlaid to backtrack complete terrace risers. The approach was validated using four study areas with different topographic characteristics in the Loess Plateau, China. The results verify that the approach achieves outstanding performance and robustness in mapping terrace risers. The precision, recall, and F-measure were 90.81%-97.57%, 88.53%-94.10%, and 90.13%-95.80%, respectively. This approach is flexible and applicable with freely available images and DEM sources.
The aim of this study was to determine how often rural farmers in a watershed use no-tillage systems combined with crop rotation, contour farming and agricultural terraces. The study area was Paraná ...Watershed III (PB3) in the western region of Paraná State, and data from the 2006 Agricultural Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics were used. A frequency distribution analysis of farms as a function of the no-tillage (NT) area was conducted in combination with a cluster analysis of soil and water conservation practices (adoption of crop rotation, contour farming and agricultural terrace practices). The results showed that the farms in PB3 adopt adequate soil and water conservation practices, with 73% adopting NT combined with at least 2 other conservation practices; however, agricultural terracing was found to be the most neglected practice in the region. In addition, based on the soil and water conservation practices in the watershed, 5 groups of farms were identified, the worst of which, those located in the municipalities that mainly neglect conservation practices, live in areas with highly erodible soils.
Establishing the construction sequence of agricultural terraces is extremely complicated due to the nature of their technological foundation and use. A number of methodological approaches have been ...developed to address this difficulty, such as bulk soil
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C dating, Optically-Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), sediment grain size, or a combination of these, but a fundamental problem of stratigraphic disturbance still exists. In this article, we utilize multiple datasets, including radiocarbon determinations, faunal isotopic signatures, human osteological remains, archaeobotanical data sets, energetics assessments, and spatial data to establish the origins of Philippine Cordillera rice terraces. Dominant historical narratives in the region suggest a 2000-3000 b.p. inception of the terrace systems, but previous Bayesian modeling and current archaeobotanical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic data indicate that the shift to wet-rice cultivation is a recent phenomenon and a response to the intrusion of the Spanish Empire in the northern highland Philippines.
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