New article: Land use and demography in Greece
2019-02-14
In September 2017, DoLP participants were invited to participate in a workshop organized by the Levehulme financed project Changing the Face of the Mediterranean. The result was a special issue in the Holocene, with 14 articles now being published. DoLP is represented in four of them, the first of which is out now!
The article offers a comparative study of long-term trends in land use and demography in southern and northern Greece, and is available with Open Access.
Abstract
This paper offers a comparative study of land use and demographic development in northern and southern Greece from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period. Results from summed probability densities (SPD) of archaeological radiocarbon dates and settlement numbers derived from archaeological site surveys are combined with results from cluster-based analysis of published pollen core assemblages to offer an integrated view of human pressure on the Greek landscape through time. We demonstrate that SPDs offer a useful approach to outline differences between regions and a useful complement to archaeological site surveys, evaluated here especially for the onset of the Neolithic and for the Final Neolithic (FN)/Early Bronze Age (EBA) transition. Pollen analysis highlight differences in vegetation between the two sub-regions, but also several parallel changes. The comparison of land cover dynamics between two sub-regions of Greece further demonstrates the significance of the bioclimatic conditions of core locations and that apparent oppositions between regions may in fact be two sides of the same coin in terms of socio-ecological trajectories. We also assess the balance between anthropogenic and climate-related impacts on vegetation and suggest that climatic variability was as an important factor for vegetation regrowth. Finally, our evidence suggests that the impact of humans on land cover is amplified from the Late Bronze Age (LBA) onwards as more extensive herding and agricultural practices are introduced.