An 8000-year history of landscape, climate and copper exploitation in the Middle East: the Wadi Faynan and the Wadi Dana National Reserve in southern Jordan

Investigations of geomorphology, geoarchaeology, pollen, palynofacies, and charcoal indicate the comparative scales and significance of palaeoenvironmental changes throughout the Holocene at the junction between the hyper-arid hot Wadi â??Arabah desert and the front of the Mediterranean-belt Mountains of Edom in southern Jordan through a series of climatic changes and episodes of intense mining and smelting of copper ores. Early Holocene alluviation followed the impact of Neolithic grazers but climate drove fluvial geomorphic change in the Late Holocene, with a major arid episode corresponding chronologically with the â??Little Ice Ageâ?? causing widespread alluviation. The harvesting of wood for charcoal may have been sufficiently intense and widespread to affect the capacity of intensively harvested tree species to respond to a period of greater precipitation deduced for the Roman-Byzantine period - a property that affects both taphonomic and biogeographical bases for the interpretation of palynological evidence from arid-lands with substantial industrial histories. Studies of palynofacies have provided a record of human and climatic causes of soil erosion, and the changing intensity of the use of fire over time. The patterns of vegetational, climatic change and geomorphic changes are set out for this area for the last 8000 years.

Land-use patterns and cultural change in the Middle to Late Bronze Age in Ireland: inferences from pollen records

In Ireland, the Middle to Late Bronze Age (1500-600 cal. B.C.) is characterised by alternating phases of prolific metalwork production (the Bishopsland and Dowris Phases) and apparent recessions (the Roscommon Phase and the Late Bronze Age-Iron Age transition). In this paper, these changes in material culture are placed in a socio-economic context by examining contemporary settlement and land-use patterns interpreted from the pollen record. The vegetation histories of six tephrochronologically-linked sites are presented that provide high-resolution and chronologically well-resolved insights into changes in landscape use over the Middle to Late Bronze Age. The records are compared with published pollen records in an attempt to discern if there are any trends of woodland clearance and abandonment from which changes in settlement patterns can be inferred. The results suggest that prolific metalworking industries correlate chronologically with expansive farming activity, which indicates that they were supported by a productive subsistence economy. Conversely, declines in metalwork production occur during periods when farming activity is generally less extensive and perhaps more centralised, and it is proposed that disparate socio-economic or –political factors, rather than a collapse of the subsistence economy, lies behind the demise of metalworking industries.