ИСТИНА

Studying cultural layers of former settlements, and regularities of their formation, we deal with the historic legacies of the soil-society interactions in the past. It is important both as a contribution to practical geoarchaeology and for basic understanding of former human environmental interactions produced cultural layer in the historical past and transforming ones after settlement desolation. Micromorphology started in archaeology since 50s of the XX c., soon after soil micromorphology was established. An exponential growth of micromorphological works in archeological context began in 90-s of the last century. There are hundreds of publications on archaeological micromorphology; nonetheless, a recent paper by the world-leading experts declares that the method is still underutilized in geo(archaeology) (Goldberg, Aldeias, 2016). Actually most of on-topic publications are case studies devoted to applied geoarhaeological problems. Further progress of archaeological micromorphology in basic knowledge about human-environmental interactions within former settling areas demands efforts on compilation, generalization and synthesis of information on micromorphological features in cultural layers of different age, cultural, economical, and natural environmental backgrounds. Our study is an attempt to compare micromorphological features of early medieval archaeological sediments located in different background environments. A key advantage of micromorphology is demonstrated: an opportunity for separate identification of anthropogenic and geogenic features, their space-and-time interactions, related processes of their formation. Conducted studies revealed clear geographic and geochemic regularities in occurrence of geogenic (soil, sedimentary and post-sedimentary) microfeatures. Anthropogenic features were subdivided into those related to disturbance of original horizonation and its replacement by anthropogenic ones, features related to anthropogenic material input, and man-induced neoformations. A set of anthropogenic features imprints local past human impact: the higher a variety of athropogenic features and their abundance is, the more intensive and variable human impact occurred in the past. An occurrence of certain anthropogenic features may indicate not only human-related processes of their formation (or input), but also a contemporary soil environment favorable, or, in the opposite, deteriorative for ones.