The Geoarchaeology of Agricultural Terraces in Europe: Construction, Resilience and Implications for Sediment Delivery

ABSTRACT Although the primary purpose of agricultural terracing can be assumed to be food production, it has been suggested that a secondary purpose was the control of soil erosion. In this paper, we explore this thesis with multi‐proxy data from the TerrACE project, which studied 20 sites in a latitudinal transect across Europe. These sites show that terrace construction was often related to previous slope instability or erosion and that terracing maintained greater soil depths than the surrounding slopes. In some cases, it seems likely that the observation of landsliding that lowered slope angles and produced an accumulation of fractured regolith may have led to opportunistic terracing. The almost universal occurrence of multiple‐phase sequences revealed maintenance and re‐use that protected buried soil organic carbon. Three case studies show; headwater sediment and carbon retention by terracing, how terracing could be resilient to severe regional environmental events (eruption of Thera) and, lastly, the modelling of failure and sediment supply from vineyard terraces. Although there is no doubt that terracing reduced soil loss from slopes, whether the perception of an erosion risk was part of the conscious reasons for terrace construction is far harder to ascertain, but cross‐cultural awareness of these factors does seem to be likely.

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Publication Details

Journal
Geoarchaeology
Published
2025-03-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.70008
Citations
6
Primary Topic
Soil erosion and sediment transport
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
7.12

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article

The Geoarchaeology of Agricultural Terraces in Europe: Construction, Resilience and Implications for Sediment Delivery

Alejo Molinari, Andreas Lang, Rosa M. Albert, Kevin Walsh et al.
6 citations
Geoarchaeology
Soil erosion and sediment transport
7.12
article

The Geoarchaeology of Agricultural Terraces in Europe: Construction, Resilience and Implications for Sediment Delivery

Alejo Molinari, Andreas Lang, Rosa M. Albert, Kevin Walsh, Georgia Tsartsidou, Wei Wei, Daniel Fallu, Pengzhi Zhao, Paolo Tarolli, Sara Cucchiaro, Anna María Stagno, Ben Pears, Antony G. Brown, Mónica Alonso Eguíluz, Sabina Ghislandi, Leonides Vokotopoulos, Kristof Van Ost
article en
6 citations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although the primary purpose of agricultural terracing can be assumed to be food production, it has been suggested that a secondary purpose was the control of soil erosion. In this paper, we explore this thesis with multi‐proxy data from the TerrACE project, which studied 20 sites in a latitudinal transect across Europe. These sites show that terrace construction was often related to previous slope instability or erosion and that terracing maintained greater soil depths than the surrounding slopes. In some cases, it seems likely that the observation of landsliding that lowered slope angles and produced an accumulation of fractured regolith may have led to opportunistic terracing. The almost universal occurrence of multiple‐phase sequences revealed maintenance and re‐use that protected buried soil organic carbon. Three case studies show; headwater sediment and carbon retention by terracing, how terracing could be resilient to severe regional environmental events (eruption of Thera) and, lastly, the modelling of failure and sediment supply from vineyard terraces. Although there is no doubt that terracing reduced soil loss from slopes, whether the perception of an erosion risk was part of the conscious reasons for terrace construction is far harder to ascertain, but cross‐cultural awareness of these factors does seem to be likely.

GeoarchaeologyVol. 40(2)
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ES), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE), University of Padua (IT), University of Salzburg (AT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (CN), University of Southampton (GB), University of York (GB), University of Genoa (IT), UCLouvain (BE), American School of Classical Studies at Athens (GR)
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, H2020 European Research Council
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Soil erosion and sediment transport
7.12
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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