Related Papers
Cultivation of choice: new insights into farming practices at Neolithic lakeshore sites
Amy Styring
The high-quality organic preservation at Alpine lakeshore settlement sites allows us to go beyond simplistic reconstructions of farming in the Neolithic. The rich archaeological datasets from these sites may be further complemented by methods such as nitrogen isotope (δ15N) analysis of charred crop remains. At Hornstaad-Hörnle IA and Sipplingen, on the shore of Lake Constance in south-west Germany, this method has been used to provide a unique insight into strategies of cultivation such as manuring on both a spatial and temporal scale.
Prehistoric land use as recorded in a lake-shore core at Lake Constance *
Manfred Rösch
The second part of a pollen profile from Hornstaad/Lake Constance (Germany), containing the Atlantic and Subboreal (6400 cal B.C. to 700 cal B.C.) is presented. The diagram has a sampling interval of 1 cm and an average time resolution of 10 years. The cereal curve provided the basis for cereal zones, which are used to classify the human impact. Twenty-six cereal zones can be distinguished, most of them divided into subzones, from 5500 cal B.C. to 700 cal B.C. They correspond to both known and, mostly, unknown settlements in the surrounding landscape from the Early Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. Charcoal and chemical analyses as well as sediment accumulation, confirmed by accelerator dates, provide evidence for human impact on the environment.
PAST. The Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society, 85/April 2017, 1-3.
Beyond Lake Villages in the Neolithic of Austria
2017 •
Henrik Pohl, Timothy Taylor
Waterlogged archaeological sites offer exceptional insights into prehistoric life. Excellent preservation conditions for most organic materials enable archaeological research to deploy its full interdisciplinary arsenal and gain a deeper understanding of socio-economic and ecological conditions. The waterlogged sites on the shores of the Alpine lakes and in the wetlands of the perialpine zone are among the most famous and evocative. Nearly 30 waterlogged lacustrine sites are known from Austria.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
The significance of climate fluctuations for lake level changes and shifts in subsistence economy during the late Neolithic (4300–2400 b.c. ) in central Europe
2006 •
Stefanie Jacomet
In the last decades, data on the economy and environment of the Neolithic period of lake dwellings (4300–2400 b.c.) in central Europe has increased considerably and also palaeoecological data on lake level fluctuations has been thoroughly elaborated. Lake shores were mainly settled during warm and rather dry climate periods which caused a fall in the lake levels. Nevertheless, there were strong and partly very short-term shifts in the economy during the lake-dwelling period. These can be recognised only because the settlement layers can be very precisely dated by dendrochronology. In this article we discuss in an interdisciplinary way the possible interrelations between climatic and economic changes. To explain the latter, we assume crop failures as the main reason, which caused intensified hunting and gathering. There are three different possibilities which might explain this: cold and wet summers, severe droughts during spring and summer, or local over-exploitation of soils in densely settled areas.
Reconstructing Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Hinterland and Lake Shore Socio-Environmental Interactions in the Three Lake Region of Western Switzerland (2017)
Julian Laabs
Within the scope of the project "Beyond lake villages: Studying Neolithic environmental changes and human impact at small lakes in Switzerland, Germany and Austria" special emphasis is put on reconstructing possible scenarios of human-environment interactions in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, ca. 4300-800 cal. BC. Our subproject focuses on the Three-Lakes-Region in Western Switzerland, which was one of the most densely settled circum-Alpine regions during the Neolithic. The extraordinary richness of (bio-) archaeological data from the lake shore villages provides us with reliable information about prehistoric subsistence economy, social organization and, in many cases, with highresolution dendrochronological dating. The impact of human activities on the environment is constraint by the modes of production of the studied societies. Sociocultural and technological traits are important parameters to investigate this impact of climatic and environmental changes on human societies and vice versa. The "Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator" (GLUES) has previously been used to simulate early farming societies' sociocultural development as well as the impact on their environment. GLUES is defined by the adaptive dynamics of the four state variables, population density, technological efficiency, subsistence economy and economic diversity, as well as by the resource utilities for each spatial unit, and by spatial interaction between the spatial units, e.g. migration and diffusion. We employ a new regionally scaled down version of GLUES to estimate population densities, land use and their temporal and spatial relations to environmental change under reconstructed modes of production in prehistoric Western Switzerland. This reconstruction extrapolated from the archaeologically well-known sites to the Hinterland and allows us to investigate the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age societies beyond the lake villages.
K. Kowarik, J. Maurer, H. Pohl, C. Dworsky, J. Leskovar, K. Löcker, G. Seidl da Fonseca, J. Klammer, C. Daxer, M. Strasser, M. Claire-Ries, B. Dietre, J.-N. Haas, I. Trinks und T. Taylor, Beyond Lake Villages in the Neolithic of Austria, PAST. The newsletter of the Prehistoric Society 85, 2017, 1–3.
Jakob Maurer, Henrik Pohl, Cyril Dworsky, Klaus Löcker, Marie-Claire Ries, Jean Nicolas Haas, Immo Trinks
K. Kowarik, J. Maurer, H. Pohl, C. Dworsky, J. Leskovar, K. Löcker, G. Seidl da Fonseca, J. Klammer, C. Daxer, M. Strasser, M. Claire-Ries, B. Dietre, J.-N. Haas, I. Trinks und T. Taylor, Beyond Lake Villages in the Neolithic of Austria, PAST. The newsletter of the Prehistoric Society 85, 2017, 1–3.
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
“Slash and burn” or “weed and manure”? A modelling approach to explore hypotheses of late Neolithic crop cultivation in pre-alpine wetland sites
2016 •
Stefanie Jacomet
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
2006 Arbogast R.-M., Jacomet S., Magny M. et Schibler Joerg The significance of climate fluctuations for lake level changes and shifts in subsistence economy during the late Neolithic (4300–2400 b.c. ) in central Europe
2006 •
Rose-Marie Arbogast, Jörg Schibler, Stefanie Jacomet
In the last decades, data on the economy and environment of the Neolithic period of lake dwellings (4300–2400 b.c.) in central Europe has increased considerably and also palaeoecological data on lake level fluctuations has been thoroughly elaborated. Lake shores were mainly settled during warm and rather dry climate periods which caused a fall in the lake levels. Nevertheless, there were strong and partly very short-term shifts in the economy during the lake-dwelling period. These can be recognised only because the settlement layers can be very precisely dated by dendrochronology. In this article we discuss in an interdisciplinary way the possible interrelations between climatic and economic changes. To explain the latter, we assume crop failures as the main reason, which caused intensified hunting and gathering. There are three different possibilities which might explain this: cold and wet summers, severe droughts during spring and summer, or local over-exploitation of soils in densely settled areas.
Late Neolithic Mondsee Culture in Austria: living on lakes and living with flood risk?
Stefan Lauterbach
Vegetation History and Archaeobotany
Branch wood from the lake shore settlements of Horgen Scheller, Switzerland: Evidence for economic specialization in the late Neolithic period
1998 •
Stefanie Jacomet
