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The present work deals with the colluvial deposits of the Lower Rhine in North Rhine Westphalias. The presented results are from excavations in advance of the Rhenish lignite mines Garzweiler and Inden. In Quaternary sciences colluvial deposits are as archives for many years in research focus. As a product of direct human intervention in their environment their story begins in the Rhineland already in the Neolithic period and can be traced diachronically to modern times. So far colluvial sediments were usually taken for dating or sediment budgeting approach in the geosciences. In archeology, they learned little attention because they and their archaeological materials were considered as not in superposition. By using interdisciplinary methods, consisting of sedimentological, geochemical and archaeological methods it was able to reconstruct a detailed land use history. To clarify the origin of the colluvial deposits a loess-sequence also has been studied geochemical and was compared with loess- and loess-like deposits from adjacent areas, such as the North Eifel or the Middle Rhine. The results clearly show that only the combination of methods of natural sciences and the humanities allow optimal processing of these complex findings genus. The methods used for this purpose had been optimized and modified in the preparation technique and its measurement application. For the analysis of particle size analysis by laser diffraction a new evaluation method has even developed in this work, which is based on the differences between the optical models of Fraunhofer and Mie.

eTopoi : journal for ancient studies 3, 229-236 (2012). special issue: "Landscape Archaeology : Proceedings of the International Conference Held in Berlin, 6th – 8th June 2012 / Wiebke Bebermeier, Robert Hebenstreit, Elke Kaiser, Jan Krause (Hrsg.)", Published by Berlin