Figure 5 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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The Greek part of Lake Mikri Prespa as it appears in the aerial photos of 1945. The areas under the ridge-and-furrow cultivation system are demarcated with the red lines.
Source publication
Ridge and furrow is an archaeological pattern of ridges and troughs used in Europe, frequently associated with communal open-field farming and strip cultivation. Strip farming spread throughout Europe in the Middle Ages but appears to have only slightly penetrated southern Europe. In Greece, no areas under a ridge-and-furrow system were previously...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... majority of the areas cultivated under the ridge-and-furrow system were located in the northern, north-eastern and central-eastern parts of Lake Mikri Prespa (Fig. 5), with two very small areas on the western shore, close to the villages of Pyli (40°46.44'N, 21°02.84'E) and Angathoto (40°42.73'N, 21°02.79'E abandoned after the Greek Civil War, 1946War, -1949. As in the past, these are the areas of the shoreline where the water of the lakes meets the land with the shallowest ...
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Citations
... As land use and topographic properties are crucial factors estimating soil erosion [15], the imprint of historical cultivation techniques in topographic properties are still important factors. In several areas of Germany [16][17][18][19], but also in other parts of Europe and beyond [6,18,[20][21][22], large parts of former ridge and furrow field systems are still preserved. The most evident structures are ridge and furrow fields, which consist of several parallel ridge structures of considerable length (up to 700 m) and relatively small width (about 5-20 m), separated from each other by rather small furrows. ...
Ridge and furrow fields are land-use-related surface structures that are widespread in Europe and represent a geomorphological key signature of the Anthropocene. Previous research has identified various reasons for the intentional and unintentional formation of these structures, such as the use of a mouldboard plough, soil improvement and drainage. We used GIS-based quantitative erosion modelling according to the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) to calculate the erosion susceptibility of a selected study area in Southern Germany. We compared the calculated erosion susceptibility for two scenarios: (1) the present topography with ridges and furrows and (2) the smoothed topography without ridges and furrows. The ridges and furrows for the studied site reduce the erosion susceptibility by more than 50% compared to the smoothed surface. Thus, for the first time, we were able to identify lower soil erosion susceptibility as one of the possible causes for the formation of ridge and furrow fields. Finally, our communication paper points to future perspectives of quantitative analyses of historical soil erosion.
We tested to what extent ridge-and-furrow relics can be identified with airborne LiDAR imagery and analysed whether the ridge-and-furrow can provide an archive of historical parcellation dynamics in open strip-fields. Our case study area is the central-eastern Netherlands (Twente; Veluwe) and adjacent lowland Germany (Westphalia). We sampled eight mark territories containing twenty-one neighbourhoods with unurbanised open strip-fields. The sample contained coversand, ground moraine and ice-pushed ridge landscapes. The study was based on LiDAR-derived elevation models (DEM), historical cadastres and topographic maps, soil and geomorphological maps as well as an archaeological excavation. Ridge-and-furrow relics of 1–2 decimetres height, invisible to the naked eye, were detected in every strip-field. In large strip-fields, raised headland relics divided ridged beds into two shorter strip parcels. In afforested parts of strip-fields, ridge-and-furrow was generally better preserved. Ridged beds were broadly congruent with cadastral strip parcels from the early nineteenth century. However, cadastral strip parcels were often shorter than ridge-and-furrow beds but frequently several beds wide. The identified micro-topographic patterns turned out to be an archive of historical reparcellation dynamics.
Ridge and furrow cultivation is the most widely used agricultural technique in medieval and postmedieval Europe, but the fertilization of soils during their use is not yet fully understood. Pedological analyses of this cultivation technique provided information, which led to the assumption that some of the investigated sites in Northern and Central Germany were manured with livestock excrements during cultivation. The objective of this study is to determine whether and how the soils have been fertilized and which materials were applied for this purpose. We investigated soils at five sites using phosphate and steroid analyses (stanols and bile acids), black carbon analyses, and a micromorphology study. The results showed that livestock waste was likely used as fertilizer at four of the five studied sites at low intensities, with pigs and herbivores being the probable sources of the excrement. But also the application of human feces to the soil might be possible at least at one site. Often used agricultural methods such as plaggen cultivation and an intentional charcoal input to enhance soil fertility could not be clearly verified for our study sites.
