1400 years of man-environment interactions and soil evolution in the Saint-Mont mountain (Remiremont, Vosges)

The SolHoM(a) project aims at determining the degree of landscape anthropisation in the Fossard massif (Remiremont, Vosges, France) by estimating the impact of past human occupations on current soils. Nowadays, a forest covers this relatively inhospitable mountain (hard climate, steep slopes, acid soils ...), but some remains suggest human presence for at least 1400 years. The Saint-Mont is a variscan orogenic granitic summit (height 672m) with valuable preserved archaeological relics, located south of the Fossard. At the top was founded the monasterium Habendum (from the 7th century to the French Revolution), which potentially comes after a late-antic castrum. Furthermore, monumental enclosure dry-stones walls, not yet clearly linked with the monastery, crosses the massif. Our methodology is first experienced on the Saint-Mont, well documented by recent archaeological research. It features: - sampling soil transects presenting a clear gradient from highly to poorly human impacted areas. According to those transects, soils are sampled and characterised (physico-chemistry, soil micromorphology, analysis of organic matter, dating); this should highlight traces of past human activity; - a development of algorithms to detect geometric structures in the raw LiDAR data provided by the PCR AGER(b) (Ch. Kraemer, dir). This research might help archaeologists to determine areas influenced or not by men. Once tested on the Saint-Mont, this approach will be applied to another archaeologically less investigated area of the Fossard. First field works highlight two soil sequences: - the first one, near a probable merovingian wall close to the monastery, reveals a very black 80cm deep unit, - the second one, far-off the monastery and beside the enclosure dry-stone wall, is less thick but have a thin black unit buried under 20 cm of pedogenised sediment. Physico-chemical and soil micromorphological analyses are in progress. The coming study of profiles/sequences more distant from archaeological sites will contribute to estimate the degree of soils anthropisation in the Saint-Mont. (a) Interactions Sol-Hommes-Milieux (b) ArcheoGEographie du premier Remiremont et de ses abords