Convener: Andrea Zerboni, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Co-Conveners: Giovanni Zanchetta, Kathleen Nicoll
Archaeological sites and their stratigraphies preserve the remains of cultural adaptations of our ancestors. Archaeological layers also preserve evidence of climatic and environmental changes. For these reasons, geological investigations of archaeological sediments provide valuable opportunities to learn from the past, and for documenting the diversity of human responses to climate and landscape changes. Moreover, terrestrial contexts such as stratified excavations, open-air and cave anthropogenic sediments represent sequences that correlate with natural deposits and offer the opportunity to independently date geological events. Well-dated geochronologies and sequenced archaeological remains include intercalated sedimentary sequences and embedded tephra layers that are powerful stratigraphic markers. Geologic and stratigraphic tools help reconstruct the sedimentary and post-sedimentary processes contributing to the archaeological record. In this session, we will consider cross-disciplinary studies with archaeological stratigraphies from around the world over the time span covering the Quaternary and the Anthropocene, focusing on the inter-relationships between Archaeology and Quaternary Geology and Stratigraphy.
The proceedings of the session will be printed on an international journal. The conveners will submit a proposal to Quaternary International.