0000000000643395

AUTHOR

Marie-josée Nadeau

Natural and human induced environmental changes preserved in a Holocene sediment sequence from the Etoliko Lagoon, Greece: New evidence from geochemical proxies

Abstract A key feature of Greece is the large amount of historical and archaeological records. The sedimentary record of the Etoliko Lagoon, Aetolia, Western Greece, offers an ideal opportunity to study human–environment interaction and to disentangle natural and anthropogenic imprints in the sedimentary record. By applying an interdisciplinary approach of combining geoscientific methods (XRF, LOI, grain size analysis) with archaeological and historical records, the 8.8 m long sedimentary sequence ETO1C reveals the palaeoenvironmental history of the lagoon and its catchment since 11,670 cal BP. With a thorough chronology based on 14 C age-depth-modelling including varve counting, different …

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Dating Bulk Sediments from Limnic Deposits Using a Grain-Size Approach

Radiocarbon measurements on bulk subaqueous sediments typically provide ages significantly older than actual time of deposition. This is generally caused by the presence of reworked organic compounds, which are depleted in 14C. To explore this issue of age heterogeneity, we collected 4 organic-rich samples from varying depths in a lake sediment core at the Gemündener Maar (Eifel, Germany), a lake of volcanic origin. We divided each sample into 5 standard grain-size fractions: gravel, sand, silt, clay, and 1 fraction smaller than 0.45 μm. These were cleaned separately using a standard acid-alkali-acid treatment. The highly organic gravel-size fraction provided the youngest 14C ages of all gr…

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Multi-proxy dating of Holocene maar lakes and Pleistocene dry maar sediments in the Eifel, Germany

Abstract During the last twelve years the ELSA Project (Eifel Laminated Sediment Archive) at Mainz University has drilled a total of about 52 cores from 27 maar lakes and filled-in maar basins in the Eifel/Germany. Dating has been completed for the Holocene cores using 6 different methods (210Pb and 137Cs activities, palynostratigraphy, event markers, varve counting, 14C). In general, the different methods consistently complement one another within error margins. Event correlation was used for relating typical lithological changes with historically known events such as the two major Holocene flood events at 1342 AD and ca 800 BC. Dating of MIS2–MIS3 core sections is based on greyscale tunin…

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Dust-stack 2013 of combined sediment record ELSA

During the last twelve years the ELSA Project (Eifel Laminated Sediment Archive) at Mainz University has drilled a total of about 52 cores from 27 maar lakes and filled-in maar basins in the Eifel/Germany. Dating has been completed for the Holocene cores using 6 different methods (210Pb and 137Cs activities, palynostratigraphy, event markers, varve counting, 14C). In general, the different methods consistently complement one another within error margins. Event correlation was used for relating typical lithological changes with historically known events such as the two major Holocene flood events at 1342 AD and ca 800 BC. Dating of MIS2?MIS3 core sections is based on greyscale tuning, radioc…

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Sedimentology of a profile from Etoliko Lagoon, Western Greece

A key feature of Greece is the large amount of historical and archaeological records. The sedimentary record of the Etoliko Lagoon, Aetolia, Western Greece, offers an ideal opportunity to study human-environment interaction and to disentangle natural and anthropogenic imprints in the sedimentary record. By applying an interdisciplinary approach of combining geoscientific methods (XRF, LOI, grain size analysis) with archaeological and historical records, the 8.8 m long sedimentary sequence ETO1C reveals the palaeoenvironmental history of the lagoon and its catchment since 11,670 cal BP. With a thorough chronology based on 14C age-depth-modelling including varve counting, different evolutiona…

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