Agrarian and monastic landscape
A deserted medieval manor, village hinterland and relict fields as an archive of long-term farming, manuring and landscape transformation after abandonment.
Key findings
What the study foundCarbon and nitrogen isotopes detected historical land use in areas reforested after the medieval settlement was abandoned.
Why it mattersA landscape’s present appearance can hide older uses; soil can preserve that history for centuries.
What the study foundCombined δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N values indicate a focus on C₃ cereal production and support fertilisation near the manor, while pastoral use is rejected as the main regime at this site.
Why it mattersSoil chemistry can recover specific economic choices where precise maps and written records do not exist.
What the study foundLiDAR and multivariate geochemical analysis distinguished spatial zones of human activity within the manor and its surrounding landscape.
Why it mattersAbandoned working landscapes can be mapped not only through surviving structures but through persistent chemical traces in soil.
Třebokov allows us to trace how medieval farming remains recorded in soil after centuries of reforestation.
We trace elements associated with settlement, waste, construction materials and economic activity.
LiDAR and soil data show former fields, plot boundaries and land-use traces hidden below woodland.
Carbon and nitrogen isotopes help distinguish cultivation, manuring and grazing signals.
Multivariate analysis reveals spatial variability of soil geochemical signals in the area of a medieval manorial farm.
The study combines LiDAR, historical maps, soil sampling, pXRF geochemistry and multivariate analysis to identify activity zones in and around the manor.
Stable isotope analysis in soil prospection reveals the type of historic land use under contemporary temperate forests in Europe.
The study tests whether carbon and nitrogen isotopes in soil can distinguish former land-use regimes.
Landscape model, LiDAR, geochemistry and stable isotopes.
Třebokov links settlement archaeology, monastic land management, soil geochemistry and stable isotopes into one landscape-scale archive. The site shows how a medieval agrarian landscape can remain visible in terrain, soil properties and chemical signals long after abandonment and reforestation.
The former manor, relict fields and surrounding settlement zones are not interpreted as isolated archaeological features. Together, they form a long-term record of cultivation, manuring, woodland regeneration and post-medieval landscape transformation.
The key finding is that carbon and nitrogen isotope patterns remain preserved in the soil more than 500 years after the end of medieval land use. This means that the landscape retains a durable memory of former cultivation and management, even after the fields disappeared from active use and were transformed into forest.
