Intensive land use from agricultural activities fundamentally affects the physical structure and nutrient cycling of soils and can lead to increased erosion of sediment that gets stored downslope in legacy deposits. The northeastern USA provides the opportunity to study anthropogenic-induced changes to soils, with a well-documented ~300-year history of land modification. In this study, we investigate impacts on upland soils in northeast Connecticut at two sites used extensively in the 17–20th centuries that are now abandoned and forested along with two modern agriculture sites. We use stone walls present in LiDAR and aerial imagery from 1934 to 2019 to develop an Anthropocene chronosequence with four land use classes (T₀, T₁, T₂, and T₃) that vary in terms of duration of land use and time since abandonment. The two abandoned sites differ primarily in terms of average hillslope gradients, and we use transects at the steeper site to investigate the effect of catena position on sediment mobilization and downslope changes. Soil profiles within each class were described and sampled for standard soil analyses and trace metals using pXRF to address the processes of erosion and mixing in the soils. At both sites, A horizon thicknesses increase and B horizon thicknesses decrease with increasing land use duration. The consistent depth to the C horizon across all classes, lack of soil truncations and accumulation of sediment at the base of slopes, and inventories and patterns of Pb in soil profiles all suggest land use impacts led to soil mixing and redistribution along hillslope catenas, but no substantial erosion and soil loss. Therefore, depositional areas such as wetlands, floodplains and millponds in low relief deglaciated landscapes may not contain large quantities of legacy sediment. Furthermore, widely available LiDAR and aerial imagery datasets have the potential to scale up the chronosequence approach and soil impacts described here.

农业活动对土地的集约利用从根本上影响了土壤的物理结构和养分循环，并可能导致沉积物的侵蚀加剧，这些沉积物被储存在下坡的遗留沉积物中。美国东北部提供了研究人为引起的土壤变化的机会，有大约 300 年的土地改造历史。在这项研究中，我们调查了 17-20 世纪广泛使用的两个地点对康涅狄格州东北部高地土壤的影响，这些地点现在与两个现代农业地点一起被废弃和森林覆盖。我们使用 LiDAR 中的石墙和 1934 年至 2019 年的航空影像来开发具有四种土地利用类别（T ₀、T ₁、T ₂和 T _{3 ）的人类世时间序列}) 在土地使用的持续时间和废弃后的时间方面有所不同。两个废弃地点的主要区别在于平均山坡坡度，我们在较陡的地点使用样带来研究链的影响泥沙迁移和下坡变化的位置。描述并采样了每个类别中的土壤剖面，用于标准土壤分析和微量金属，使用 pXRF 解决土壤中的侵蚀和混合过程。在这两个地点，随着土地利用持续时间的增加，A 层厚度增加，B 层厚度减少。所有类别的 C 层深度一致，没有土壤截断和斜坡底部沉积物的积累，以及土壤剖面中 Pb 的库存和模式，都表明土地利用影响导致土壤混合和沿山坡链重新分布，但没有实质性的侵蚀和土壤流失。因此，低地势冰川地貌中的湿地、漫滩和磨池等沉积区可能不包含大量遗留沉积物。此外，