Article The Story in the Floors: Chemical Signatures of Ancient and ...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/972114 (Soil Chemical Analysis of Ancient Activities in Cerén, El Salvador: A Case Study of a Rapidly Abandoned Site)
Article Soil Chemical Analysis Applied as an Interpretive Tool for A...
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=http://www.academia.edu/download/31435094/96JASActivity.pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm1tsYgNDP6rq_N3zrpipEkBRbJhng&nossl=1&oi=scholarr ( Identification of Activity Areas by Multi-element Characterization of Sediments from Modern and Archaeological House Floors Using Inductively Coupled Plasma-atomic Emission Spectroscopy )
Thanks Antonio to allert about this forum here in the RG. Last week we do have a Symposium here at Rio de Janeiro about human footprints in ancient soils - Seeing the Unseen. The most studied impact are the presence of artifact (ceramic, stones, bones mainly by the archaeologist) the impact of landscape and vegetation (by ethnobotanist and historical archaeologists, geomorphologists) the impact of the deposition (stratigraphy) by geologists, pedologists. In soil science the main parameter is the evidence of anthropic disturbances and some chemical parameters (enhance of P, C, Ca pH) and also in some cases Ca, Mn, Sr Ba. Nowadays the termoremanence effect on magnetic susceptibility on soil is gain evidence also as a strong indicator of heating. For Amazonian Dark Earth studies some books reviewed some points - Chapter Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek's Vision
The are many proxies to assessing the impacts of ancient activities on soil and landscape such as: buried soil with high phosphorus, fresh anthropogenic parent material, urban rubble & dredging, old terraces, artificial sediments, artifacts in soil such as potteries bricks…., topsoil change, anthropic horizon, soil chemistry (increase in C; N; P; change in CEC, Fe (o/d), Fe (d/t), Mn (d/t), (Ba/Sr ratio), (Ti/Zr), carbon dating, Parker index ..and so on...