Settlement and Landscape History of the Northern Franconian Jura during the Bronze and Iron Ages

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This three-stage research project is dedicated to the reconstruction of settlement patterns and exploitation strategies of the Central German Uplands in the Bronze and Iron Age (about 2100 - 30 BC) on the basis of archaeological and geoarchaeological findings, using the catchment area of the river Weismain in the northern Franconian Jura as sample case. While the first project stage was committed to demonstrate the existence of Bronze and Iron Age settlements, and finding evidence of the economic use of the uplands, the second stage focuses on two previously documented areas with a detailed analysis of continuities and changes in settlement patterns and local land use over an extended time period.By combining methodologies of broad-scale archaeological excavation, targeted test trenches and the dating of a large number of excavated findings, the proposed second stage intents to provide information on settlement size and structure regarding the individual settlement phases. Samples from undisturbed soil profiles in the settlement environment shall provide information to chronostratigraphically understand the sediments displaced in the course of past land use and concomitant soil erosion. In order to quantify and better differentiate the activities within these settlements, and in their immediate vicinity, molecular-level analyzes using biomarkers will complement the proven methodology of macro and charcoal tests, as well as micromorphological soil analysis. It is expected that the detailed collection and analysis of this data will lead to new insights on subsistence farming, as well as landscape and vegetation changes, with the ultimate goal to develop a local land use model.The third stage of the project, the development of a large scale landscape evolution model by our research partner M. Fuchs from the Physical Geography Department of the University of Gießen, is already financed by a third-party.