Application of Geoscience Methods in Landscape Archaeology

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Geosciences aims to gather quality novel research articles, reviews, and technical notes on the application of geoscience methods in landscape archaeology. Please see the summary below:

Across the world, agricultural terraces have been created to produce diverse crops, to effectively manage water resources, and to contain erosion and improve soils, and historically they have been critical in many areas of dry-land agriculture. Despite this widespread occurrence, the history of agricultural terraces remains poorly understood, as significant gaps remain in terms of adding a chronometric perspective to their construction, modification, use, and abandonment. This failure to understand the history of terraces has hampered broader research on the histories of landscapes, limiting knowledge of how settlements operated within their wider landscapes and of how terraces reflect the long-term investment choices made by rural communities. The application of geoscience techniques to this problem—quantifying, modelling, and monitoring earth surface processes at local and catchment scales from millennia to minutes—has the potential to address this, providing the temporal framework to interpret the development of terraces through time and appraise the cultural–environmental symbiosis. Applied in conjunction with geoarchaeological methods, including chemical and micromorphological analyses, and a broader landscape survey, the multi-disciplinary approach presents an opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of past terrace systems and their landscapes, and to reveal and evaluate the societal, economic, and environmental strategies that underpinned the construction, evolution, and abandonment of agricultural terraces.

Therefore, we would like to invite you to submit articles about your recent work, experimental research, or case studies, with respect to the following themes:

• Application of geoscience techniques to contextualize agrarian landscapes;
• Application of geochronological techniques to date soil-sediment accumulations;
• Sediment tracing, catchment-scale modelling of soil erosion, and loss;
• Environmental monitoring and management.

Dr. Tim Kinnaird
Dr. Aayush Srivastava
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Geosciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Anthropocene
• Agrarian terraced landscapes
• Anthropogenic geomorphology
• Soil erosion
• OSL dating
• Radiocarbon dating