IS THERE A CHANCE TO RECONSTRUCT HOLOCENE PALAEOCLIMATE DATA USING COLLUVIAL SOILS?

In the German literature colluvials are seen as correlated sediments of men induced processes like clearing, farming, settlement or mining etc. Due to the long settlement and especially farming history in Southern Germany (back to the Meso-/Neolithic era 6.000 to 8.000 a BP) they represent a widely spread geo-archive mainly beeing used for the reconstruction of the land use history. But futhermore colluvial soils store also the typology data of the eroded soils and of the processes of their formation as well as indications of pedogenetic processes which took place after the deposition. All of these processes are closely related to the climatic parameters and here especially to the precipitation. So it seems to be obvious to test these soils on their capability for a Palaeoclimate reconstruction also because colluvial soils originated in Central Europe in different settlement eras and therefor probably a time series could be established. Nevertheless the reconstruction of precipitation proxidata is difficult, because colluvials must be seen as a syngenetical product of different parameters like relief, erodibility, field size, farming techniques, pressure of population, time of usage and climate. During historic time slices written documents can help to correlate sediment- and soil data with described weather phenomena. But during prehistoric time slices, which is by far the longest part of the farming period in Central Europe, it is shown u.o. through own examples, that the reconstruction of all of the parameters which control colluvial erosion and sedimentation, is not possible at present. It would be the precondition for a reconstruction of climate data or for the correlation with already existing Holocene climate archives. Also based upon our own investigations, colluvials which doubtlessly include climatic information, can not be used for the reconstruction of palaeoclimate data at present.