All the same but different? – Anthropogenic Dark Earth on a global scale

Overview & Synopsis

Since the 1980s, the term „Anthropogenic Dark Earth“ is appearing in pedological and archaeological publications, and their original description was conneced to European Roman and medieval urban contexts. They are usually characterised as soils with thick and homogeneous dark horizons with little to no visible stratification. They are rich in organic material and charcoal, which gives them their characteristic dark colour. Since the first description, development of research, especially in geoarchaeological analysis, has revealed a great variety of possible origins of Dark Earth. Such soils appear in ancient rural and urban settlements, in many chronological and geographical contexts. They are an archive of information concerning environmental and social change, subsistence and resilience strategies. While the growing number of case studies investigating the Dark Earth phenomenon shows increasing interest in this soil, a coherent research methodology is still lacking. This makes comparative studies on a global scale considerably more difficult or even impossible. In October 2022, the interdisciplinary workshop Anthropogenic Dark Earth Colloquium (ADEC) in the framework of the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS in Kiel (Germany) made a first step towards a comprehensive understanding of the Dark Earth phenomenon from a comparative global perspective. Leading specialists in this field discussed the development of a coherent interdisciplinary research methodology for both, approaches to soil analysis and interpretations in social and environmental contexts. It was decided to publish the results of the colloquium as a kind of handbook with a practical guide, bringing together experiences and perspectives from different scientific areas and disciplines. The initiative for the ADEC came essentially from archaeologists, and they are also the main target group. The authors are mainly geoscientists, but also archaeologists. The general aim is to make field archaeologists aware of the Dark Earth phenomenon and to enable them to recognise, preserve and sample these soils. We will present the publication project and the main methodological approaches as well as some field experiences.