Abstract
The cultural layers of ancient (3rd–2nd millennia BCE) settlements are unique study objects. Top-down, they consist of modern-day soils overlapping the ancient buried soil, strongly altered by anthropogenic pressure. Cultural layers always contain the remains of artifacts and human life in the settlement, such as bones and ceramics. Settlement sites contain cultural layers that are a promising object for studying the ancient anthropogenic mineral formation. Still, such studies should follow the study of the principal physical and chemical properties of soils. Soils of a Bronze Age settlement were studied along with the natural soils of the floodplain terrace of the Volga river, which form a common area with the terrace of the Samara River. Paleourbanozems (soils formed on cultural layers of ancient settlements) with anthropogenic horizons built into the system of natural soil horizons are formed on the settlement site. The Krasnosamarskoe settlement revealed two generations of solonetzic soils located one above another and differing in the thickness of solonetzic jointing (including thin-columnar solonetzic soils). These solonetzic soils were formed during various stages of the Bronze Age, but subsequently, they morphologically merged into a single horizon. The author investigated the stages of soil cover formation of river valleys in connection with the long-term anthropogenic impact with a specific focus on the Bronze Age societies of the Samara Volga region.
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Acknowledgements
During participation in excavations carried out by the international archaeological expedition, the Survey Administration (P. F. Kuznetsov, O. I. Mochalov, A. A. Khokhlov, and David W. Anthony) kindly provided us with a possibility to make soil sampling for further analysis of the physical and chemical composition using the assets of the Arkaim reserve (Prof. G. B. Zdanovich, paid travel to the object, meals on the expedition, reagents for chemical analysis), and the resources of the Research Equipment Sharing Center (TsKP) of the Institute of physicochemical and biological problems in soil science under the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Federal Research Center (Pushchino, the Russian Federation), under the research project, State Assignment No AAAA-A18-118013190175-5.
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Plekhanova, L.N. (2023). Features of Paleosol Formation as a Key Indicator of Anthropogenic Impacts on Examples of Bronze Age Cultural Layers of the Krasnosamarskoe Settlement. In: Ankusheva, N.N., Chechushkov, I.V., Epimakhov, A.V., Ankushev, M.N., Ankusheva, P.S. (eds) Geoarchaeology and Archaeological Mineralogy—2021. Springer Proceedings in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16544-3_3
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