Determining ancient land use: detailed level and large scale

From Carla Lancelotti's Twitter

Earlier this week, I spent a fascinating few days in Barcelona, participating in a research workshop on land use in early Europe. The workshop was part of the “LandCover6k: European Land-use at 6000BP” project and was organised by Nicki Whitehouse, Ferran Antolin and Marco Madella.

The working group for this project is investigating prehistoric human impacts on land cover (i.e. anthropogenic land cover change due to land use), and assessing if impacts were sufficiently large to have a major impact on regional climates.

Colleagues from around Europe came together to provide an overview of evidence from each of our regions. It was wonderful to hear how we each interpret our datasets, hearing from some of the leading scholars in each region. We focused on agricultural and land management evidence, showing exactly where we had data, site by site, and synthesizing and standardising our datasets, with the aim of produce a coherent picture of land use across Europe at the point of 6000 BP (4000 cal BC). 

For more information on this exciting project, see here.