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Detail of Gabriel Bodenehr's map of Speyer (18 th c.) showing the area of the cathedral and today's Domgarten; indicated are the spots of core drillings (based on a copper engraving by Gabriel Bodenehr, Stadtarchiv Speyer: 234_III-41).
Source publication
Despite the presence of kilometres-long dikes bounding the River Rhine, flooding is still regarded as a risk. Many flood prevention measures are still being studied at universities, debated in local forums, and executed along the rivers. Flooding is currently a matter of particular interest because of climate change, but it has been a threat to hum...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... once ran through the area. As a flowing river would have disturbed the sediments, it could be expected that the whole research area would consist of mixed layers. Since this is not the case, we assume that the thicker mixed areas (corings RKS2 & RKS4) are former channels of the Rhine, as is correspondingly derived from an 18 th century AD map ( fig. 4) 50 . The organic materials in a layer of fluvial sediments underneath, which date back from the 10 th to the 16 th century AD, also support this idea. All in all, the data indicates that this area was part of the riverbed during the 18 th century AD and that, later, the channel was filled up with anthropogenic sediments and reworked ...
Citations
... However, it is only from the medieval period onwards that large-scale landscape engineering and systematic floodplain reclamation can be observed in many catchments [64][65][66]. Embankments, dykes, artificial channels, milldams, fishponds and weirs, bridges and systematic levelling and waste disposal from this era are typically encountered archaeological features [9,62,[67][68][69]. The impact of these anthropogenic features on floodplain sedimentation and fluvial morphodynamics has been discussed [43,49,70], but the features themselves have rarely been the target of specific research, so they usually serve to tell a rather simplistic background story. ...
... Ice drift, disastrous floods [122], channel displacement [123] and droughts [95,124] have a remarkable impact on fluvio-cultural units [125]. Riverine societies have developed techniques to control and exploit extreme events and protect (agri)culture from floods: damming, river straightening and canalisation [42,52,69,79], drainage systems and plantings against erosion [87,90]. Situations in the upper courses of rivers [93] and on smaller rivers, for which the term 'flood culture' has been suggested, seem to be particularly dynamic [126]. ...
Floodplains represent a global hotspot of sensitive socioenvironmental changes and early human forcing mechanisms. In this review, we focus on the environmental conditions of preindustrial floodplains in Central Europe and the fluvial societies that operated there. Due to their high land-use capacity and the simultaneous necessity of land reclamation and risk minimisation, societies have radically restructured the Central European floodplains. According to the current scientific consensus, up to 95% of Central European floodplains have been extensively restructured or destroyed. Therefore, question arises as to whether or when it is justified to understand Central European floodplains as a ‘Fluvial Anthroposphere’. The case studies available to date show that human-induced impacts on floodplain morphologies and environments and the formation of specific fluvial societies reveal fundamental changes in the medieval and preindustrial modern periods. We aim to contribute to disentangling the questions of when and why humans became a significant controlling factor in Central European floodplain formation, and how humans in interaction with natural processes and other chains of effects have modified floodplains. As a conclusion, we superimpose emerging fields of research concerning the onset of the Fluvial Anthroposphere and provide 10 specific thematic objectives for future multidisciplinary work.
