This work sheds light on the complex interplay between urban growth and the Mediterranean environmental impact over centuries 🤔 @iphes-cerca.bsky.social @ub.edu
@ethelallue.bsky.social

🌳🌲 From the Late Middle Ages onwards, oak usage rebounded, although the vegetation around the city was highly degraded. This increase in Quercus wood is consequence of the widening in the wood catchment areas, and the key role of imports, mostly from the NE coast of Catalonia

🌳🌲Key insights🌲🌳: during the Middle Ages, holm oak woodlands declined compared with Roman times, with a rise in Ericaceae shrubs, maquis species and arboricultural wood debris. This shift likely reflects deforestation for agriculture, grazing and firewood.

As a result, we obtained a 1700-year anthracological sequence revealing how Barcelona shaped its surrounding woodlands due to wood fuel extraction. We framed our findings within the city's historical context, highlighting socio-economic and urban transformations between the Medieval and Modern times

These excavations were conducted over the last 20 years in the Ciutat Vella neighborhood. Our work focuses on the Medieval and Early Modern periods, while also connecting to earlier data from Roman times (Bianco et al. 2023).

Here the newspaper article that explains what these strange guys from the south were doing in the Burgos countryside 😅 www.diariodeburgos.es/noticia/z233...

This is the first fieldwork that we did in the framework of "Dendrolandscapes" project from the University of Balearic Islands in collaboration with colleagues from the archaeobotany unit of @iphes-cerca.bsky.social, which were conducting parallel experiments regarding fire 🔥

We collected samples from trunks, using a Pressler auger, and 3 discs with different diameter of a branch of the same tree, to study the growth rates of these two organs (trunk and branch) in different growing situations (pioneer tree, understory, pollarded, unmanaged etc.) 🌳🌳🌳

Hello! I would like to be added! Thanks 😊

I would like to be included! Thanks!!