Marjolein D. Bosch, a member of the PalArch Group, presented a poster at the XXI INQUA congress in Rome, Italy. The poster presentation was part of session 99 on the topic "Lipid Biomarkers as Molecular Archives of Human Activity at Archaeological Sites" organised by Margarita Jambrina-Enríquez (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain), Natalia Égüez Gordon (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain), Rory Connolly (University College Dublin, Ireland) and Carlos Duarte Simões (ICArEHB – Universidade do Algarve, Portugal).
The poster with the title "Biomarkers at the Late Pleistocene open-air loess site Ollersdorf-Heidenberg (Austria)" presented preliminary results of our lipid biomarker study at Ollersdorf-Heidenberg, a Gravettian site in Lower Austria, excavated between 2017 and 2022 by our team.
Biomarkers at the Late Pleistocene open-air loess site Ollersdorf-Heidenberg (Austria)
Marjolein D. Bosch, Margarita Jambrina-Enríquez, Stéphane Pirson, Freddy Damblon, William C. Murphree, Carolina Mallol, Walpurga Antl-Weiser, Philip R. Nigst
The period from 36,000 years ago towards the Last Glacial Maximum sees changes in environmental conditions with a general slow shift to a colder and more arid climate. The open-air loess site of Ollersdorf-Heidenberg (Austria) comprises a Gravettian archaeological horizon dated to around 29,000 years ago and two additional Upper Palaeolithic archaeological horizons. Rescue excavations in the 1990s and 2000s yielded rich lithic and faunal assemblages as well as evidence of charred plant matter. During new fieldwork at the site in 2017, 2018 and 2022 we used biomarkers from sediments to assess anthropogenic activity and their environmental context throughout the sequence.
Our results show that (1) organic matter is well-preserved throughout the sequence, (2) the sequence preserves several stabilisation horizons in an open-grassland environment, which are sometimes accompanied with archaeological remains, and (3) brown lenses observed in the field comprise uncharred organic matter. No evidence of combustion activity could be detected through the biomarker approach. We hypothesise that observed brown lenses are caused by an increase of organic matter input - potentially through anthropogenic activity - rather than the result of climatic improvement. These results are congruent with those from our soil-micromorphological and macroscopic geological analyses. The preservation of organic matter confirms the potential of Ollersdorf-Heidenberg for investigating human responses to environmental conditions.
This project has been funded by the DM McDonald Grants and Awards Fund (Cambridge, UK), the University of Vienna, and the Department of Prehistory (Natural History Museum, Vienna), and supported by an EC FP7 MC Career Integration Grant (grant no. 322261, NEMO- ADAP project), a Seal of Excellence Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (TechnoBeads project), and the Museumsverein Stillfried-Grub, Austria. Many thanks to the landowners (Veith family) for the permission to conduct our fieldwork.
