Sediment talks, or: what interdisciplinary archaeological prospection of the Kreuttal microregion’s sediment archive can tell us about the landscape history
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Jetzinger, D., Gallistl, J., Kinnaird, T., Truntschnig, T., Kasemann, S., Schwaiger, A., Salisbury, R.B., Doneus, M., Kucera, M., Stahlschmidt, M., Fera, M., Neubauer, W., 2025. Sediment talks, or: what interdisciplinary archaeological prospection of the Kreuttal microregion’s sediment archive can tell us about the landscape history. ArcheoSciences n° 49-1, 359-362.
Introduction
The analysis and reconstruction of archaeological landscape histories is a complex task further complicated by the 4D nature of the sediment archives we study, comprising the 3D spatial dimension and the fourth dimension, time. An effort towards tackling this four-dimensionality is currently being undertaken by the “Life of a Landscape” project in the Kreuttal microregion of Lower Austria. The area was subject to substantial anthropogenic activity dating back to at least the Early Neolithic. An interdisciplinary methodology facilitates an archaeological landscape biography by providing detailed information on landscape change and development, formation processes, and chronostratigraphy from the sediment archive. Methods include targeted coring, electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) measurements, portable optically stimulated luminescence (pOSL) profiling and OSL dating. This extensive dataset complements existing magnetic prospection data (Kucera et al., 2024) and topographic data from LiDAR-derived digital terrain models (DTM).