| Palaeoecology provides an opportunity to examine the interaction of human impact and climatic change on the forest composition and cover of European forests over time. Sediment cores retrieved from four lake and fen sites on the Eggstätt-Hemhofer Seenplatte (EHS), in southern Bavaria, Germany, were analyzed to reconstruct the vegetation history of the region since the late glacial. The sampling locations were sited near archaeological settlements dating from the late Neolithic.; The results of my investigation suggest that humans left their mark on the landscape, but the size of forest clearances and species composition attributed to human activity cannot be established from pollen studies alone. I identify complexes of factors—climatic change, human decision making and economic behavior, and forest ecology—and discuss how they interact to produce changes in forest composition and vegetation over time. In addition, major theoretical shifts in the fields of archaeology, ecology, and palaeoclimatology need to be integrated into models that relate pollen data to human behavior: archaeological documentation of gradual economic transitions during the Neolithic, evidence for a variable Holocene climate, and recognition of the importance of past history and catastrophic events in forest development necessitate a reevaluation of some of the assumptions used to reconstruct human land-use intensity from pollen diagrams.; Based on an examination of the European and global lake records as well as pollen data from temperate Central Europe, I argue for a shift in moisture balance coinciding with the late Neolithic—early Bronze Age transition. The apparent synchroneity of a climatic shift around 4000 BP and archaeological evidence of an intensified rate of change in human subsistence, settlement, and innovation is not coincidental. Cultural practices and environmental forcing interact: it is traces of this dynamic that are preserved in the record of landscape change. |
