Written in soil and paper : investigating environmental transformations of a monastic landscape by combining geoarchaeology and palynology with historical analysis at Samos (Spain)

Abstract

Palaeoenvironmental and historical approaches have often been used separately to investigate past land-use change, but they are still rarely combined, especially in places where the most suitable archives are sediment sequences. Here we used a transdisciplinary approach combining a multiproxy palaeoenvironmental study of two pedosedimentological sequences around a medieval Benedictine abbey at Samos in north-west Spain. A robust chronology was built using OSL apparent ages, conventional OSL and radiocarbon ages and used to date geochemical and palynological proxies which were then analysed alongside an exhaustive historical review of medieval and modern ecclesiastical records. The aims were to reconstruct the agrarian history of the place in a diachronic way and to deepen understanding of the interplay between palaeoenvironmental and historical sources. We demonstrate the potential value of using geoarchaeology, palynology and written sources together to address both the physical and socioeconomic aspects of land-use change.