The Geoarchaeology of Agricultural Terraces in Europe: Construction, Resilience and Implications for Sediment Delivery
(2025) Geoarchaeology : an international journal — Vol. 40, n° 2, p. 1 (2025)
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- Authors
Brown, Antony G. 
- Abstract
- Although the primary purpose of agricultural terracing can be assumed to be food production, it has been suggested that a secondarypurpose was the control of soil erosion. In this paper, we explore this thesis with multi‐proxy data from the TerrACE project, whichstudied 20 sites in a latitudinal transect across Europe. These sites show that terrace construction was often related to previous slopeinstability or erosion and that terracing maintained greater soil depths than the surrounding slopes. In some cases, it seems likely thatthe observation of landsliding that lowered slope angles and produced an accumulation of fractured regolith may have led toopportunistic terracing. The almost universal occurrence of multiple‐phase sequences revealed maintenance and re‐use that protectedburied soil organic carbon. Three case studies show; headwater sediment and carbon retention by terracing, how terracing could beresilient to severe regional environmental events (eruption of Thera) and, lastly, the modelling of failure and sediment supply fromvineyard terraces. Although there is no doubt that terracing reduced soil loss from slopes, whether the perception of an erosion riskwas part of the conscious reasons for terrace construction is far harder to ascertain, but cross‐cultural awareness of these factors doesseem to be likely.
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Citations
Brown, A. G., Pears, B., Cucchiaro, S., Tarolli, P., Lang, A., Zhao, P., Walsh, K., Van Oost, K., Albert, R.-M., Alonso‐Eguiluz, M., Vokotopoulos, L., Tsartsidou, G., Molinari, A., Stagno, A., Ghislandi, S., Wei, W., & Fallu, D. (2025). The Geoarchaeology of Agricultural Terraces in Europe: Construction, Resilience and Implications for Sediment Delivery. Geoarchaeology : an international journal, 40(2), 1. https://doi.org/10.1002/gea.70008 (Original work published 2025)