Reading medieval landscapes through soils: geoarchaeological insights from Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic

This paper was presented at the YRA seminar series in September 2026.

Medieval anthropogenic soils and sediments preserve complex records of human activity, environmental change and landscape transformation. Their interpretation can be particularly challenging in floodplain settings, where anthropogenic, pedogenetic and fluvial processes interact and repeatedly modify the archaeological record. This talk presents a geoarchaeological investigation of a well-preserved sequence of anthropogenic soils and floodplain sediments from Uherské Hradiště, an important settlement and trade centre on the Morava River in the Czech Republic. Archaeological evidence is combined with soil micromorphology, physical and geochemical analyses, palaeobotanical data and chronological information to reconstruct the formation of Dark Earth and changing patterns of land use from the Early to the High Medieval period. Initial settlement activities began around the transition between the 7th and 8th centuries CE, followed by increasing human impact and evidence of craft and market-related activities during the Great Moravian period, in the 9th century CE. After a hiatus in the 10th–12th centuries AD, the site saw re-establishment in the 13th century CE, marking the early formation of the urbanisation in Uherské Hradiště. Despite repeated flooding, the settlement in the area was renewed repeatedly. Together with evidence of long-distance trade, this proves the importance of the place located on the commercial waterway of the Morava River. New findings reveal that this settlement could have played a more essential role in the Early Mediaeval era than previously expected.

The research presented here was published in 2025 and can be found here.

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