College of Arts & Humanities

Past in present soils: Leveraging development-led archaeological data to generate insights into urban soil development and soil health

Healthy soils are essential to a sustainable future. In today’s rapidly expanding urban contexts, they are fundamental to improving biodiversity, storing water, supporting urban farming, and improving wellbeing. While immediate impacts of today’s human actions on soil health are readily grasped, the ongoing impacts of past human actions are less well understood. This poses significant risks: policymakers, planners, land managers, and communities lack the information needed to plan how to maintain healthy soils over longer periods. In dense urban areas like London, where human activity is concentrated, development-led archaeology can contribute a critical deep-time perspective and substantial data on urban soils, including records of London’s ‘made ground’, which is created by long-term human activity in cities.

This PhD will develop a model which brings together archaeological information on soils with information relevant to soil health. To develop the model, the PhD will compile, interpret, and repurpose a wide array of data, including data on subsurface conditions and ‘buried soil’ preservation produced by development-led archaeology in the City. It will result in new approaches to connecting knowledge about past human interactions with soils to current knowledge about soil health, enabling a more holistic understanding of the processes which influence soil health over different timescales, connecting an archaeological perspective and how we understand our impacts on soil health and development today.

The PhD researcher leading this project will:

1. Assess the information needs of soil health professionals, e.g., environmental protection officers, using qualitative research methods.

2. Establish interoperability of commonly used indicators of soil health, proxy data types, and archaeological soil data using semantic modelling methods.

In collaboration with MOLA’s geomatics and geoarchaeology departments:

3. Using semantic and linked data modelling methods, develop a suite of experimental cross-mappings between geoarchaeological and soil health data.

4. Classify, map and assess the thickness, composition, and micromorphological character of the urban anthropogenic soil mantle in selected areas of London to generate new knowledge about urban soil development and health.

Research questions include:

• How can insights into soil health and development be created by re-evaluating ‘standard’ descriptions of soil deposits, stratigraphic sequences, and borehole data collected during archaeological excavations and planning?
• To what extent would the inclusion of archaeological data in Soil Observatories’ (e.g. UKSO/EUSO) frameworks measurably enhance their users’ understanding of soil systems?
• Are there conditions in areas of London which have resulted in enhanced preservation of Anthropogenic Soils?