Abstract
The environmental context of cultural transformation’ - frames the central issue of this paper – how were Neolithic and Chalcolithic landscapes in the Aegean, Balkan and Carpathian (ABC) zones shaped and transformed by climatic and anthropogenic impacts? The difficulties in interpreting proxy records for the middle, transitional stage of the Holocene aridification sequence, falling between the early wet stage and the late arid stage, have been created by the conjoint influence of two kinds of impact – climatic and anthropogenic. An unhelpful influence in this debate stems from Willis and Bennett's (1994) hypothesis of minimal human impact on the pre-Bronze Age landscapes of South East Europe. In this paper, two questions are posed: (1) what were the effects of the claimed global changes in Holocene climate at the regional and local scale in the ABC zones?; and (2) can we recognise human impact in these proxy records prior to the Bronze Age of our study regions? Following a discussion of general long-term climatic trends and RCCs (episodes of rapid climatic change), I base a discussion of the so-called 8200BP ‘event’ and pre-Bronze Age human impacts on a suite of 24 well-dated proxy records – mostly pollen sequences. The principal findings are that there is little evidence for impact from the 8200BP ‘event’ in these records, while there is substantial evidence for pre-Bronze Age human impacts on the landscapes of the Aegean, Balkan and Carpathian regions.
Highlights
The middle Holocene period witnessed one of the most dramatic periods of change in European prehistory – the spread of a farming way of life from Western and North West Anatolia to the Aegean zone, the Balkans, the Carpathians and beyond into North-Central Europe
The latest paper from Weninger’s team (Weninger et al 2014) presents an extraordinary mass of 14C data, coring results and site-based archaeology but completely fails to link all of these data sets to support their main proposal: “We demonstrate a precise temporal coincidence and strong social impact of rapid climate changes on Neolithic dispersal processes” (2014, 2)
While the Dik12 core shows perennial pasture plants from the mid-7th millennium BC and anthropozoogenous taxa from the mid-6th millennium BC (2015, Fig. 4), there was a sudden appearance of Cerealia pollen in the mid-7th millennium BC in the Dik4 core, with Cerealia values rising to 10% - a clear sign of human impact (2015, Fig. 6)
Summary
The middle Holocene period witnessed one of the most dramatic periods of change in European prehistory – the spread of a farming way of life from Western and North West Anatolia to the Aegean zone (zone A), the Balkans (zone B), the Carpathians (zone C) and beyond into North-Central Europe. 30%, there were renewed signs of human impact, especially pastoral practices, in the late 6th millennium BC These data are significantly early in the settlement of North Greece, showing local human impact on what was ‘a pristine forested environment’ (2015, 246), representing a far earlier series of human impacts than was detected in the regional pollen diagram of Tenaghi Philippon. The results of the comparisons of proxy vegetational records with dwelling sequences at settlements close to the pollen cores show clear evidence for ‘human impact’ in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, dated to one or two millennia before the Bronze Age when impact began according to the Willis – Bennett model. The key factor which Willis and Bennett overlooked was the scale of agricultural practice (Bogaard 2004), which remained small-scale in the Early Neolithic but increased in scale in the Later Neolithic and Chalcolithic
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