Black Carbon as Indicator for Human Environment Interactions in the last 190,000 Years
Information
Principal Investigators: E. Lehndorff, W. Amelung
Fire has accompanied human activity since millennia. In the first and second phase of this CRC, we advanced the analytical tools to reconstruct fire temperature and fuel origin by geochemical analyses of black carbon (BC), and we found proxies for distinguishing BC of local fires from BC of fire aerosols that were transported over long-distances. The respective analyses of the composition of benzene polycarboxylic acids (BPCA) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) were then applied to environmental archives (palaeosols, and selected lake sediments). We found that the burning signal was well preserved in palaeosols, but soil erosion processes prevented a reconstruction of fire regimes from these types of archives. In contrast, the analyses of the lake archives allowed tracing human and palaeoclimatic impacts on vegetation fires back to the Neolithic and beyond. There were strong hints of an altitudinal control on vegetation and wild fire development and thus of potential barriers for human mobility in the Eifel area (during MIS3, Central Europe).
Early and Pre-Neolithic cultural change was found to influence BC composition in on-site sediments (i.e., Ifri Oudadane rock shelter, Morocco (with C1) and in artefact rich soil relicts close to a maar lake, Germany (with D4), while overall combined effects of humid climates and forest development seemed to exert the main control factor for fire development in the Lake Van area (West Asia). Yet, since we can only depict such information from point measurements, the reconstruction of fire pathways along Our Way to Europe still warrants a spatial linking of BC data across all archives available in this CRC or with collaboration partners. A comparison of BC properties in archaeological sites with those of other environmental archives is now foreseen to enhance our understanding of man-induced fire signal variability into Pre-Neolithic times.