Differences of soil physical and chemical properties between unirrigated paleo-cropping layers layer and natural sediment layer in Donglingshan Mountain, Beijing

doi:10.7523/j.ucas.2024.014

Abstract

Abstract: The identification of paleo-cropping layers is an essential part of the study of the origins of agriculture and the exploration of ancient human land use. It is a challenge that archaeologists and palaeoenvironmentalists are facing together. The existing methods of identifying ancient cultivation layers are costly and limited, and there is an urgent need to develop new, simple, convenient, and reliable methods to identify ancient cultivation layers. Farming without irrigation, using plows to turn the land, once occurred in Beijing's Dongling Mountains and continued for at least 300 years before retiring. There are also natural meadows and broadleaf forests in the area with no tillage history. In this study, four types of soil profiles, namely natural meadow, natural broadleaf forest, abandoned farming meadow, and abandoned farming broadleaf forest, were compared in terms of their soluble salt content, pH, magnetic susceptibility, and color characteristics in order to establish a method for identifying ancient cultivation layers. It was found that the soluble salt content in the abandoned farming soil profile was significantly lower than that in the natural profile, and the coefficient of variation was also significantly lower than that in the natural profile. The soluble salt content and its coefficient of variation can be used to identify ancient tillage layers without irrigation. Soil magnetic susceptibility and pH also have potential value in identifying ancient cultivation layers, and further in-depth studies are needed.

Key words: Paleo-cropping layers, Soil soluble salt content, Dongling Mountains, Land use, Paleoenvironment, Agricultural archaeology

CLC Number:

P593

LU Xuanze, LI Yumei, WANG Luo. Differences of soil physical and chemical properties between unirrigated paleo-cropping layers layer and natural sediment layer in Donglingshan Mountain, Beijing[J]. Journal of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.7523/j.ucas.2024.014.

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