Impacto medioambiental de la minería y la metalurgia del cobre durante la Edad del Bronce en Kargaly (región de Orenburgo, Rusia)

Juan Manuel Vicent García; M.ª Isabel Martínez Navarrete; José Antonio López Sáez; Ignacio de Zavala Morencos

doi:10.3989/tp.2010.10054

Authors

Juan Manuel Vicent García Grupo Prehistoria social y económica, Instituto de Historia, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC
M.ª Isabel Martínez Navarrete Grupo Prehistoria social y económica, Instituto de Historia, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC
José Antonio López Sáez Grupo Arqueobiología, Instituto de Historia, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC
Ignacio de Zavala Morencos Dpto. de Ingeniería Cartográfica, Geodesia y Fotogrametría. Escuela Universitaria de Ingeniería Técnica Agrícola. Universidad Politécnica

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2010.10054

Keywords:

Eurasia, Late Prehistory, Holocene, Fuel, Palaeocology, Radiocarbon, Quantitative Archaeology, Landscape Archaeology

Abstract

Kargaly (Orenburg, Russia) is a copper-producing region in which two main phases of mining activity have taken place: the 4^th-2^nd millennia BC and the 18^th-20^th centuries AD. This article is a comparative study on the impact of those mining episodes in the distribution of the forest resources in the region, aimed to estimate the scale of prehistoric mining and metallurgical works. For that purpose two paleopalinological sequences obtained from natural deposits located in Kargaly are analysed by inferential Statistics and Multivariate Methods. The results are compared both with a regional sampling of recent pollen rain supported by an analytical model of the present day landscape, and with the anthracological data coming from the Late Bronze Age settlement of Gorny 1. Analysis confirm the large scale of the prehistoric mining impact on the forest cover from the beginnings, as well as the strong effect of husbandry once mining works ended. These results allow us to dismiss a climatic change as main explanation for the detected diachronic variability in the palinological record. They also prove the viability of the proposed approach as a means of integrating the paleoenvironmental disciplines in Landscape Archaeology.

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