ORIGINAL PAPER Applications of micromorphology to understanding activity areas and site formation processes in experimental hut floors Rowena Y. Banerjea & Martin Bell & Wendy Matthews & Alex Brown Received: 20 February 2013 /Accepted: 1 October 2013 /Published online: 6 December 2013 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract Experimental buildings at Butser Ancient Farm and St. Fagans (UK) and Lejre (Denmark) were sampled to investigate micromorphology of known activity areas, to contribute to our understanding of the internal use of space in excavated buildings and formation processes of house floor deposits. The experimental buildings provided important information relating to activity residues and sediments over the 16 years that the buildings were in use. Specifically, these results contribute to our understanding of the routes and cycles for transportation of materials in occupation contexts, which can be used to inform archaeological studies. It has been possible to identify internal ‘hot spots’ within the buildings for the deposition of activity residues and for the formation of specific deposit types. Analysis also highlighted post- depositional alterations occurring in internal occupation deposits, which has provided a means of identifying roofed and unroofed spaces in the archaeological record. Keywords Experimental archaeology . Geoarchaeology . Micromorphology . Formation processes Introduction A key issue that confronts archaeologists working on settlements concerns the identification and interpretation of activity areas, and particularly the ability to identify stages in the life history of buildings (La Motta and Schiffer 1999) and the associated occupation deposits. In order to address this, archaeologists must understand the pre-depositional environment, the formation of archaeological deposits and the post-depositional processes that effect archaeological strata. Understanding these formation processes is central to interpreting the archaeological record (La Motta and Schiffer 1999; Schiffer 1987). Anthropogenic sediments within settlements have complex depositional and post-depositional formation processes, which provide challenges for geoarchaeologists in interpreting the origin of activity residues contained within them. Consequently, micromorphology has become an important tool in reconstructing the use of space and in interpreting formation processes within archaeological buildings (Matthews 1997). Experimental archaeology can play an important role in advancing such interpretations through creating a database of reference material from known activity areas and internal spaces, which can be used to provide more robust interpretations of the archaeological record. In this experimental research, buildings reconstructed from archaeological site plans at Butser Ancient Farm (Hants., UK), Lejre Historical and Archaeological Research Centre (Denmark), and St. Fagans, (National History Museum Cardiff, Wales) were subject to small-scale excavation and thin section micromorphology sampling to investigate the formation of the sedimentary record, in order to provide these comparative reference data. Most of the buildings investigated were constructed 16 years prior to sampling and have housed a range of activity spaces over their lifetime. These sites enable formation processes within buildings to be studied in a temperate climate in different geological settings, providing examples which will inform investigation and interpretation of activity traces in a range of settlement archaeological contexts, on a range of substrates. These experimental archaeological contexts enabled targeted examination of known activity areas, specific Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12520-013-0160-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. R. Y. Banerjea (*) Quaternary Scientific, School of Human and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, UK e-mail: r.y.banerjea@reading.ac.uk M. Bell : W. Matthews : A. Brown Department of Archaeology, School of Human and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, UK Archaeol Anthropol Sci (2015) 7:89–112 DOI 10.1007/s12520-013-0160-5