Lechterbeck J (2008) The Event Horizon in Landscape development: When Economy makes the Landscape Cultural. In: Posluschny A, Lambers K, Herzog I (eds) Layers of Perception - Proc. 35th Int. Conf. Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) Berlin, April 2-6, 2007, 374. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Event Horizon in Landscape Development: When Economy Makes the Landscape Cultural
2008
Agricultural activity is economic activity and the development of the cultural landscape can be understood as the accumulation of economic processes. A macroeconomic index derived from pollen-analytical data is presented here. The scores on the first axis of a canonical correspondence analysis are used to show the intensity of land use through time. These scores correlate with the cultural indicator curves when the vegetational development is dominated by agriculture involving grassland, arable fields and ruderal patches. In the Lake Constance area and the Rhineland, this point is first reached in the Bronze Age, when there is no primordial forest left. The cultural landscape can be seen as a capital resource and the development of the cultural landscape as capital formation. This development is an irreversible and directed process. Further research will show whether the human impact curve can serve as a long-term economic index analogous to cereal prices.
"The development of cultural landscapes can be understood as an accumulation of economic processes, including agricultural activity. For the modelling of past agricultural pressure, the actual vegetation and the amount and type of agricultural land has to be reconstructed. In the last decades, great efforts by an international network (POLLANDCAL) were made to develop reliable and comprehensible methods for vegetation reconstruction from pollen data. These efforts culminated in the landscape reconstruction algorithm (LRA) which consists of two modules, Regional Estimates of Vegetation Abundance from Large Sites (REVEALS) and Local Vegetation Estimates or LOVE (Sugita 2007a, 2007b). The algorithm allows reconstructing the percentage a certain taxon has in the actual vegetation from its pollen representation. Here, the results of the application of the LRA to pollen analytical data from the Lake Constance region are presented. A quantitative reconstruction for a Young Neolithic time window (3700 – 4200 BC) is carried out and the amount of agricultural land is estimated. Based upon the estimation of yields and the number of people these could support, vegetation types are defined and allocated to geomorphological entities. This is the basis of a simulation to test the reconstruction and fitting of the model (Bunting and Middleton 2005). The paper presents a first attempt to reconstruct vegetation and economic pressure using REVEALS, LOVE and LRA in the Lake Constance area and the results are therefore critically evaluated."
Estimations of population density, which consider regional variability, are an important key variable in archaeology as they have consequences not only for the environmental but also for the economical and social domains. In this paper, a ten-step procedure of a consistent group of methods is described which deals with the data required for estimations of population density at different scale levels (from excavation to large-scale distribution maps). For distribution maps, a method is presented by which densities of sites are displayed using optimal isolines. These demarcate so called 'settlement areas' at scales of between 1:25,000 and 1:2.5 million. Our knowledge of the density of households from key areas with the most complete archaeological records is upscaled for the regions within these isolines. The results of this procedure are estimations of population density for the early Neolithic (Bandkeramik, 51st century BC) and the Roman period (2nd century AD) for regions with some 10,000 km². A simple statistical/graphical method is developed to analyse the relationship between settlement areas, soils, and precipitation. Taking into account the aspects of preservation of sites and the intensity of archaeological observations, an analysis of patterns of land use shows that in prehistory not all areas suitable for use were in fact incorporated into settlement areas. For prehistory, the idea of a most optimised use of land up to its carrying capacity (as it has been proposed for at least 50 years) can be falsified for specific areas. A large number of empty regions with good ecological conditions but lacking in settlement activity can be discussed as resulting from culture historical processes. As an example, the separation of areas inhabited by groups of different identities is discussed. The amount of used space (in terms of 'settlement area') however, increases from the early Neolithic to the 4th century BC from 5% to more than 40% . The increase between the Neolithic and the Iron Age is understood in terms of technological developments in farming systems. The percentage of areas with suitable conditions actually utilised between the Bandkeramik and Iron Age increases from 31.1% to 67.5% in the area covered by the Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinlande, and is much higher still in the Roman period (84.3%). State societies seem to use the land more efficiently compared to non-state systems. This is becoming even clearer on consideration of the intensity of human impact.
A. Zimmermann/ K.P. Wendt/ Th. Frank/ J. Hilpert, Landscape Archaeology.
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 75, London u.a. 2009, 1-53
Estimations of population density, which consider regional variability, are an important key variable in archaeology as they have consequences not only for the environmental but also for the economical and social domains. In this paper, a ten-step procedure of a consistent group of methods is described which deals with the data required for estimations of population density at different scale levels (from excavation to large-scale distribution maps). For distribution maps, a method is presented by which densities of sites are displayed using optimal isolines. These demarcate so called 'settlement areas' at scales of between 1:25,000 and 1:2.5 million. Our knowledge of the density of households from key areas with the most complete archaeological records is upscaled for the regions within these isolines. The results of this procedure are estimations of population density for the early Neolithic (Bandkeramik, 51st century BC) and the Roman period (2nd century AD) for regions with some 10,000 km². A simple statistical/graphical method is developed to analyse the relationship between settlement areas, soils, and precipitation. Taking into account the aspects of preservation of sites and the intensity of archaeological observations, an analysis of patterns of land use shows that in prehistory not all areas suitable for use were in fact incorporated into settlement areas. For prehistory, the idea of a most optimised use of land up to its carrying capacity (as it has been proposed for at least 50 years) can be falsified for specific areas. A large number of empty regions with good ecological conditions but lacking in settlement activity can be discussed as resulting from culture historical processes. As an example, the separation of areas inhabited by groups of different identities is discussed. The amount of used space (in terms of 'settlement area') however, increases from the early Neolithic to the 4th century BC from 5% to more than 40% . The increase between the Neolithic and the Iron Age is understood in terms of technological developments in farming systems. The percentage of areas with suitable conditions actually utilised between the Bandkeramik and Iron Age increases from 31.1% to 67.5% in the area covered by the Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinlande, and is much higher still in the Roman period (84.3%). State societies seem to use the land more efficiently compared to non-state systems. This is becoming even clearer on consideration of the intensity of human impact.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 23, Supp. 1, 121-133., 2014
Abstract Off-site pollen data as well as onsite plant macrofossil data from Southwest Germany enable the distinguishing of three main phases of agricultural land use history. The last phase, here simplified called the ‘‘Extensive ard phase’’, had already started in the Bronze Age and ends in the 19th century A.D. It is characterized by extensive land management, permanent fields with short fallow phases, ploughing, the use of animal dung as fertilizer, and grazed woodlands. The first phase, comprising the Old and Middle Neolithic, is characterized by hoe-farming only on very fertile soils and a very restricted set of crops. For the second phase, comprising the Young, Late and Final Neolithic, a slash-and-burn-like agricultural system is most probable. During the Late and Final Neolithic, this cultivation system with fire use and shifting fields was gradually practised on permanent fields and was modified, leading finally to the ‘‘Extensive ard’’ land use system with fertilizer and ploughing instead of burning.
Geomorphology, 2009
Almost every agricultural activity has an effect on vegetation. In fact, human impact is the most important and continuous factor in the vegetational development of landscapes that have been settled since prehistoric times. Hence vegetational changes are the key to the evaluation of past human impact. Human impact in the pollen record can be assessed in two ways: positively by so-called cultural indicators—pollen of cultivated plants such as cereals and of plants that tolerate human impact; and negatively by the disappearance of pollen from plants that do not tolerate human impact. The percentage values of cultural indicator pollen can serve as measure for the intensity of human impact. This approach, however, neglects negative indicators of human impact which provide information on the response of the natural vegetation to anthropogenic influences.Here, we introduce first results obtained by applying a multivariate statistical technique to extract a proxy for human impact from pollen data. We use canonical correspondence analysis, which has been applied successfully for the connection and spatial analysis of pollen data from the Rhenish Loessboerde. The long-term objective is to develop land-use models derived from pollen data which allow diachronic comparison of the intensity and character of human impact for different landscapes of the Rhine catchment. As a result, maps of land-use intensity can be evaluated by maps of archaeological settlement density, which are developed by an archaeological working group in Cologne in the LUCIFS program.
HUMAN-MADE ENVIRONMENTS THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANDSCAPES AS RESOURCEASSEMBLAGES, 2021
Quantitative analysis and modelling of the archaeological record are common tools for the defi nition of activity spheres of individuals and groups. However, these cultural models quickly tend to draw clearly limited distribution ranges of ethnically distinct ‘peoples’ and their ‘territories’. But communication corridors, material distribution and individual mobilities are subject to a rather multi-layered variety of physical-natural and cognitive-experienced parameters that lead to a certain created landscape that is transformed and expanded over time. The potential of landscape or system archaeology lies in the combination and integration of the various parameters that form the specifi c individual landscapes. In order to evaluate and apply these parameters to past societies, however, archaeologists are dependent on modern surface conditions that are interpolated to draw conclusions about past environmental feedbacks. But how do patterns of pre-modern societies behave in comparison to those of today’s land surfaces? How strong is the impact of modern land-use activity and surface modifi cation on our perception of the dispersal of the archaeological record? This article analyses spatial patterns of Early Medieval land-use in the Upper Rhine Area with regard to settlement continuity and the modern bias of the archaeological distribution.