"The grape seeds tell the whole story of the region," Bar-Oz said. They also examined coins, potsherds and glassware shards, which they dated by analyzing their designs. The researchers estimated the age of each layer of the mounds using radiocarbon dating of charred grape seeds and charcoal. "If you look at modern estimates of trash accumulation, this figure is not that far off from the volume of trash that we produce today in our modern hyper-consumer societies." "By our estimates of the scale of trash accumulation that were obtained with a combination of analyzing drone images, ground surveys and excavation in the mounds, the city was accumulating about 6,000 cubic meters of trash per year," Bar-Oz said. (MORE: Average American indoor home climates resemble outdoor climate of western Kenya: Study) The city was the capital of the province of Palestina Salutaris, and the hub of a network of seven smaller settlements and hundreds of scattered farmsteads. The scientists excavated four mounds surrounding Elusa. They discovered it was the city's largest trash mound, and had the eureka moment that such landfills could represent a stable, continuous record of human activity over time, since they were not subject to the constant renovation that cities often experience. In 2015, Bar-Oz and his colleagues found a potential way for archaeology to examine climate effects when they began examining a mound full of stove ash and construction debris outside the Byzantine city of Elusa in the Negev Desert in what is now Israel. The ancient sites that archaeologists investigate are frequently complex jumbles of structures built over and often destroying their predecessors, making it difficult to precisely judge how climate might influence them over time, he explained. (MORE: Newly found Chinese fossils from 518 million years ago show explosion of life)Īrchaeology has until now been largely left out of the debate over the role that climate change has played in human history, said study lead author Guy Bar-Oz, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa in Israel.
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