Geoarchaeological assessment of long-term site- and field-management characteristics at the pre-Aksumite site of Mezber, Tigrai Plateau.

Summary

The ancient polities of the Tigrai Plateau and this region’s pronounced climatic variations combine to create a research paradigm where social-environmental interactions can be considered over the long-term. Existing regional-scale indicators suggest that human responses to climate variability differed between peoples, polities and time-periods. Framed by an ongoing regional study designed to examine high-resolution climate and environmental markers at a broad-spatial scale, the study of the pre-Aksumite (1600 BCE – 1 CE) site of Mezber allows more refined a site-level understanding of anthropogenic interactions to be developed, both site-use and agrarian land management. This paper considers a set of geoarchaeological measurements and land-use proxies, including micromorphology, image analysis and inorganic chemical analysis of the sediments for this site. The complex dynamics between regional climate variations and indicators of past fire-husbandry and land management at this site are then explored.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• An Historical Ecological Approach to the Investigation of Early Social Complexity in the Horn of Africa: First Steps

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16417