Ancient agricultural terraces in the Eastern Mediterranean: Finding socioecological legacies in the soil memory

Terraces are key agricultural infrastructures within mountainous landscapes all over the world.
Research has primarily focused on their relevance in mitigating soil erosion, carbon storage, and as a
means of improving agricultural productivity. However, the historical significance of ancient terraces
as records of past events is often overlooked, even though they are hotspots of human-environment
interactions. This has hampered broader research on the histories of terraced landscapes, examining
when and why rural communities developed them and how their long-term investment choices have
shaped these landscapes. This project aims to reconstruct ancient terracing agricultural practices in
the Eastern Mediterranean, using the soil memory paradigm to decode and construct environmental
histories of terraces in Turkiye and Cyprus. The project relies on a pioneering combination of
methods like OSL dating, soil micromorphology, geochemical analyses, lipid markers detection,
phytolith analysis, and sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) extraction to uncover insights into
ancient agricultural practices and environmental conditions recorded in soils. Therefore, this project
will not only generate knowledge on human-environment interactions within past agricultural
communities but also have relevance for informing sustainable strategies for the future.