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Evaluating the Influence of Neolithic Agropastoral Land Use on Holocene Fire Regimes Through Simulated Sedimentary Charcoal Records

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Abstract

Archaeological and paleoecological studies demonstrate that human-caused fires have long-term influences on terrestrial and atmospheric systems, including the transformation of “wild” landscapes into managed, agricultural landscapes. Throughout Europe, the emergence of Neolithic land use likely contributed to broad-scale alterations of fire regimes, resulting in changes in vegetation community composition and distribution. However, mismatches between archaeological data on early agropastoral practices and paleoecological data on fire history and vegetation change make the relationship between Neolithic farmers and landscape change difficult to interpret. Computational modeling offers a new approach to anthropogenic fire that links social and biophysical processes in a “virtual laboratory” where long-term scenarios can be simulated and then compared with empirical data. This chapter applies the Charcoal Record Simulation Model (CharRec) to empirical, sedimentary charcoal records from three study areas in eastern Spain and evaluates how Neolithic agropastoral burning practices, including fire spatial distribution, frequency, size, and intensity, may have influenced fire regimes during the Holocene. With the emerging interest in tracing the prehistoric roots of the Anthropocene, computational models in archaeology are increasingly important in answering the difficult and often tangled questions regarding the feedbacks between humans and their environments in long-term social ecological systems.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Sean Bergin and Salvador Pardo-Gordó for organizing the “Modeling the Spread of Agriculture: The Application of Computational Modeling Techniques to the Neolithic Transition” session at the 24th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Barcelona and for inviting me to contribute this chapter. Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (Award # 1656342). I also thank the authors of the case studies highlighted in this chapter and appreciate their willingness to share their charcoal data directly or curate it in the Global Paleofire Database for other researchers to freely access, analyze, and interpret.   

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  1. USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Center for Forest Disturbance Science, Athens, GA, USA

    Grant Snitker

  2. Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Grant Snitker

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  1. Departamento de Geografía e Historia, Universidad de la Laguna San Cristóbal de la Laguna, Santa Cruz, Spain

    Salvador Pardo-Gordó

  2. School of Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Sean Bergin

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Snitker, G. (2021). Evaluating the Influence of Neolithic Agropastoral Land Use on Holocene Fire Regimes Through Simulated Sedimentary Charcoal Records. In: Pardo-Gordó, S., Bergin, S. (eds) Simulating Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory . Computational Social Sciences(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83643-6_9

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