Session: #1082

Regular session

Potash, tar, resin, and charcoal (PoTaRCh) are four materials closely linked in their materiality, of extraordinary importance for societal resource use and the most important products of non-timber forest use in Europe. Related to production and use are questions of competitive material sourcing, sustainability, overexploitation and socio-economic consequences which bring together scholars from different disciplines, as well as museum acteurs and people still producing in a traditional way. A newly established EU-COST-action (www.cost.eu/actions /CA22155) aims to improve, by networking of scientists and practitioners researching and working on PoTaRCh in Europe and beyond, the understanding of (pre-)historical developments and patterns and the heritage legacy. In this session, we focus on the archaeological record of the production sites, including archived ecofacts. Numerous studies in Europe investigate charcoal production sites, but also tar production. Potash and resin production is rarely tracked archaeologically, thus contributions on these non-timber woodland products are highly welcomed, as are all contributions dealing with excavations, lidar-detection, using the sites as archives for environmental history, etc. Charcoal production sites are used as archives for woodland reconstructions by analysing their wood charcoal remains. Distribution and density give valuable insight into former land use intensities, also in marginal regions. Archaeological excavations are important to understand usage period and multiphasing. The archaeological sites yield remains of the processing, which can be analysed for their chemical composition.

charcoal production, tar production, environmental archaeology, woodland usage, land use intensity

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Oliver Nelle (Germany) ^1,2

Koen Deforce (Belgium) ^3,4
Sylvain Burri (France) ⁵