Soil science applications in archaeological contexts: A review of key challenges

Abstract

The recent emergence and application of Earth Science techniques, such as elemental analysis, to detect isotopes, biomarkers, trace and ultra trace metals, in combination with long established techniques like magnetic susceptibility and micromorphology, can allow fascinating insights into the analysis of soils at archaeological sites. Soil studies can reveal how humans in prehistory used the landscape and defined space through their activities. However, these new approaches do not wholly address persistent problems associated with making inferences about past human activity from soils. These challenges include: equifinality; distinguishing property–process relationships; identifying anthropogenic soil processes; the interdependency of the soil forming factors; and difficulties with soil dating. This paper reviews more than a decade of pedoarchaeological studies, structured around new approaches to addressing these challenges. The paper outlines a staged framework which helps to create a systematic interpretation of soil processes and properties, and considers the impact of anthropic soil processes and properties in this context. This approach can be used as a guide to ensure that a rigorous and reproducible approach is taken to the study of soils at archaeological sites. In making this framework explicit, the paper finds that establishing property–process relationships in the soil is an essential precursor to reliable pedoarchaeological interpretation. It is argued that in the future, new applications developed in the Earth Sciences that aid our understanding of archaeological soil processes in three dimensions, will be able to contribute the most to addressing persistent challenges in pedoarchaeological interpretation.