Meso-scale landscape changes reconstructed from fluvial and alluvial sedimentological archives around the roman town Chimtou (Medjerda Valley), North Tunisia

The settlement of Chimtou located in the Medjerda valley is known for its marble quarry, where yellow marble was mined for the entire roman empire. During the Roman period Chimtou has been a major roman city but little is known about the changes during the transition to the Arab period. The interdisciplinary project ISLAMAFR aims to understand the cultural, economic and landscape transformations of the western Medjerda Valley from late antiquity to the early medieval period (600 to 1000 AD).

Earlier studies in the region by Christoph Zielhofer and Dominik Faust have shown that the landscape evolution of the Medjerda Valley derived from alluvial records indicates short-term changes in fluvial dynamics in the Holocene. During the upheaval from Roman to Arab period they reconstructed great flooding events for the Western Medjerda Valley with a brief slow-down in fluvial activity during the Arab conquest. On the basis of their work we will densify the landscape history using two fluvial and alluvial archives from the hinterland of Chimtou for the period from 600 to 1000 AD. We analyzed sediment cores in the laboratory from an infilled oxbow lake of the Oued Medjerda and a flood channel, which regularly overflows. The successive phases of channel infill of the archives allow us to reconstruct the fluvial activity and landscape changes in their surroundings. A multi-proxy approach was applied, integrating the analysis of the dated high-resolution sediment records with geomorphological mapping, archaeological records, and geological and topographical data. Coupling the long-term landscape changes with high resolved short-term landscape changes identifies the human-environmental interactions in the hinterland of Chimtou from late antiquity to early medieval period.