Land use, social transformations and woodland in Central European Prehistory (2019-2021)
Principal investigator: Jan Kolář
Project is supported by Czech Science Foundation
Members from LabGIS: Martin Macek
Questions to be addressed
- What is the relationship between the character of archaeological evidence and supposed land use?
- How did different technologies change the character of the relationship to forests and land use in general?
- How is population dynamics related to the archaeologically detected human activities? Can we register the “archaeologically invisible” people in other than archaeological archives?
- How did the intensification of agriculture change the relationship between human societies, land use and forests?
- How can archaeological models improve palaeoecological interpretations and vice versa?
- Which plant species, currently considered as natural elements, were influenced during prehistory by human land use? Can we specify the dating and define the specific types?
- How many landscape types with unique sequences of human occupation histories can we distinguish and how relevant are they in the context of the current vegetation?
- What is the pattern of human land use legacy? Setting aside the effects of abiotic conditions, how strong is the relationship to the actual vegetation pattern?
The project will uniquely use both archaeological and palaeoecological modelling approaches. The combination of results from both disciplines will create an inter- and possibly trans-disciplinary perspective, which is often missing from existing research.