Normunds Stivrins

Palaeoenvironmental evidence for the impact of the crusades on the local and regional environment of medieval (13th–16th century) northern Latvia, eastern Baltic

This paper evaluates the impact of the crusades on the landscape and environment of northern Latvia between the 13th–16th centuries (medieval Livonia). The crusades replaced tribal societies in the eastern Baltic with a religious state (Ordenstaat) run by the military orders and their allies, accompanied by significant social, cultural and economic developments. These changes have previously received little consideration in palaeoenvironmental studies of past land use in the eastern Baltic region, but are fundamental to understanding the development and expansion of a European Christian identity. Sediment cores from Lake Trikāta, located adjacent to a medieval castle and settlement, were studied using pollen, macrofossils, loss-on-ignition and magnetic susceptibility. Our results show that despite continuous agricultural land use from 500 BC, the local landscape was still densely wooded until the start of the crusades in AD 1198 when a diversified pattern of pasture, meadow and arable land use was established. Colonisation followed the crusades, although in Livonia this occurred on a much smaller scale than in the rest of the Ordenstaat; Trikāta is atypical showing significant impact following the crusades with many other palaeoenvironmental studies only revealing more limited impact from the 14th century and later. Subsequent wars and changes in political control in the post-medieval period had little apparent effect on agricultural land use.

The final meltdown of dead-ice at the Holocene Thermal Maximum (8500–7400 cal. yr BP) in western Latvia, eastern Baltic

It is commonly assumed that the majority of buried ice-blocks in Europe melted at the end of Late Glacial period and during the first part of the early-Holocene. We show, however, that scattered dead-ice-blocks may have been preserved in the ground until 8500 cal. yr BP. We analysed thermokarst features in Lake Ķikuru, western Latvia, by means of a multi-proxy approach (pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs, plant macrofossils, diatoms, loss-on-ignition, magnetic susceptibility, C:N ratio, carbon accumulation rate and radiocarbon dating). Abiotic and biotic processes following the ice-block meltdown suggests abrupt development of a thermokarst from 8500 to 7400 cal. yr BP. Important changes in local vegetation occurred with the deepening of a kettle-hole during the transition from a fen to a lake that nearly coincided with the appearance of the first fish at 7800 cal. yr BP, thus forming a clear indication of a lacustrine environment. Our study shows that a thin peat layer formed at first and, due to the meltdown of the ice-block, it gradually lowered to the bottom of the kettle-hole, and gyttja begun to accumulate afterwards. Given that thermokarst arise when the mean summer air temperature gradually increases to a value above the present-day temperature, we must assume that the local conditions must have been exceptional to secure ice-block from the meltdown for so long. Therefore, the legacy of the last ice age was still evident even ca. 5500 years after the Weichselian ice retreat from the eastern Baltic.