Long time-series ecological niche modelling using archaeological settlement data: Tracing the origins of present-day landscape
Abstract
Human activities have shaped the environment since long before the advent of agriculture and resulted in anthropogenic landscapes, which are sometimes perceived as natural, but are clearly shaped by dozens of previous generations. This study is the first to apply ecological niche modelling on a long time-series of archaeological data to illuminate the development of the landscape from the perspective of settlement behaviour and its dependence on environmental conditions.
Using a large dataset of evidence of prehistoric settlement activities covering the area of the Czech Republic and spanning 6600 years from the beginning of agricultural prehistory, we analyse to what degree settlement was related to environmental parameters. We quantified the strength of this relation in terms of the predictive power of ecological niche models generated with the MaxEnt method.
We observed a significant variability of settlement behaviour over time, but also landscape occupation, which has retained similar general characteristics to now. This shows that settlement strategies were remarkably stable and the presence of previous settlement was beneficial for subsequent land-use.
Comparison of prehistoric settlement with contemporary landscape typology also points to a long-term legacy pre-dating historical periods, which makes the landscape our largest and most important heritage monument.