The environment they lived in: anthropogenic changes in local and regional vegetation composition in eastern Fennoscandi
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The environment they lived in: anthropogenic changes in local and regional vegetation composition in eastern Fennoscandia during the Neolithic Teija Alenius1,2 · Laurent Marquer3 · Chiara Molinari4 · Maija Heikkilä5 · Antti Ojala6 Received: 6 October 2019 / Accepted: 12 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Understanding about regional versus local changes in vegetation is critical in answering archaeological questions, in particular at a time when humans are assumed to have caused higher disturbances at local scales rather than regional scales; this is the case during the Neolithic. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of Neolithic land use on regional and local vegetation dynamics, plant composition and disturbance processes (e.g. fire) in eastern Fennoscandia. We apply the Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) to high-resolution pollen records from three lacustrine sediment cores that cover the Neolithic period. We calculate changes in vegetation composition and the rate of plant compositional change. Fire dynamics are estimated as an indicator of land use, although fire can result from both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Our results show that during the Early Neolithic, changes were mainly driven by natural and climate-induced factors and vegetation composition and fire activity were similar at both regional and local scales. From ca. 4000 bc onwards, trends in vegetation and fire dynamics start to differ between regional and local scales. This is due to local land uses that are overshadowed at the regional scale by climate-induced factors. The use of the LOVE model in pollen analyses is therefore very useful to highlight local land uses that are not visible by using REVEALS. Keywords Land cover · Plant compositional change · Pollen · Landscape reconstruction algorithm (LRA) · Fire · Environmental history · Human–environment interactions
Introduction
Communicated by M.-J. Gaillard. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-020-00796-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Teija Alenius [email protected] 1
Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, TIAS (Department of Archaeology), University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland
2
Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 38F, P.O. Box 59, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
3
Research Group for Terrestrial Palaeoclimates, Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Hahn‑Meitner‑Weg 1, 55128 Mainz, Germany
Holocene sediment archives from lakes, ponds and peat bogs in Europe provide evidence of human activities during the last ca. 12,000 years. Deforestation practices aimed at expanding areas for agriculture are commonly identified in pollen records from these archives via a decrease in tree pollen percentages and an increase in herbs and crop pollen types (e.g. Ojala and Alenius 2005; Gaillard et al. 4
Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Sölvegatan 12, 223 62 Lund, Swed
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