Where
Central Bohemia
Site type
deserted medieval village
Archive
settlement, fields and woodland
Focus
land use and rural transformation
Methods
field survey, GIS, historical sources, soil analysis
Spatial position
Aldašín as a rural landscape archive
The deserted village is studied together with its surrounding land-use zones. The aim is not only to locate the settlement, but to understand how the rural landscape was organised and transformed over time.
- deserted settlement area
- intramural and extramural zones
- fields, pastures and woodland edge
- long-term traces of farming and land-use change
What we study here
Village structure
Aldašín allows us to study how a medieval rural settlement was embedded in its wider economic and environmental setting.
Soil memory of land use
Soils and sediments are used as records of past cultivation, organic inputs, erosion, accumulation and changing land management.
Fields, pastures and woodland
The site is not interpreted only as a village core, but as a wider rural system formed by settlement, farming, grazing and woodland use.
Site profile
A deserted village as a land-use archive
Aldašín connects medieval settlement archaeology with soil and landscape evidence.
The site is suitable for studying the long-term organisation of rural space. Settlement remains, terrain forms, soils, historical sources and spatial data can be combined to reconstruct how people used, maintained and transformed the landscape around the village.
field survey
GIS
historical maps
soil sampling
geochemistry
land-use history
Research questions
Settlement
How was the medieval village organised, and how did the settlement core relate to surrounding fields and communication routes?
Land use
Which parts of the landscape were cultivated, grazed, wooded or repeatedly disturbed?
Soils
Can soil chemistry and sedimentary evidence distinguish settlement activity, manuring, erosion and longer-term land management?
Transformation
What happened to the landscape after abandonment, and how did later land use modify or preserve the medieval signal?
Interpretation for Human Earth Lab
What the site shows more broadly
Aldašín helps frame deserted villages as archives of long-term rural land use. The archaeological remains are only one part of the evidence. Soil properties, geochemical signals, terrain forms and historical sources add information about fields, manuring, erosion, woodland use and post-abandonment transformation.
The site therefore supports the broader Human Earth Lab approach: landscapes preserve traces of human activity even after settlement disappears from written memory or visible use.
Team and outputs
Research context
The site can connect archaeological fieldwork, landscape archaeology, historical geography, GIS and soil-based approaches to past land use.
Planned content
Further content may include site history, field documentation, map layers, analytical results, figures, team members and publication outputs.