The potential of historical cisterns as paleoenvironmental and geoarchaeological archive: The Negev Highlands, Israel

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In the past, the Negev Highlands in Israel were characterized by strong settlement oscillations. It is still under debate, if these oscillations were caused by demographic, (socio-)economic, political or climatic variations. As a result of the lack of suitable environmental archives in the Negev Highlands and as consequence of the problematic extrapolation of palaeoenvironmental reconstructions from the surrounding areas, climate variations in the past cannot be evaluated as a factor for changes in settlement activity. New sediment archives need to be established to enable a reliable palaeoenvironmental reconstruction for the Negev Highlands. The aridity of the region in combination with the partially high settlement activity caused the construction of large numbers of cisterns of different types to collect and store precipitation. During cistern usage, the eroded sediments from adjoining slopes accumulated within the cistern and were removed to maintain the installations. After their abandonment, the installations served as ideal sediment traps with undisturbed sediment records. The sediment accumulation within the cisterns bear the potential to be of high relevance for palaeoenvironmental reconstruction. The sediments removed to construct the installations and for maintenance purposes contain important information for geoarchaeological research. However, age determination of the cistern’s sediments is of crucial importance for using these sediments as geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental archives. For establishing a reliable chronological framework, a combination of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating and micromorphological analyses appears to be the method of choice, since they allow to constrain a time frame for the construction, use and abandonment of the investigated installations. Based on these chronostratigraphic results, the importance of the installations for settlements, agricultural activity and herding can be discussed. In addition, the chronostratigraphy of the cistern’s sediment refill provides information indispensable for the evaluation of water reservoirs as sedimentary archives by means of sedimentological, geochemical and palynological analyses. In this respect, the proposal aims at evaluating the potential of cisterns and their sediments as novel types of sediment archives for palaeoenvironmental and geoarchaeological research.