Steffen Wolters

Palaeoecological investigations connected with extensive pre-bog, stone walls, and field systems at Kilmore, Dingle peninsula, Ireland, are presented. The main pollen profile, KLM I, spans the last 4000 years. When the record opened, pine (Pinus sylvestris) was already a minor tree, oak (probably Quercus petraea) was the main tall-canopy tree, and birch and alder were dominant locally. Substantial farming is recorded between ca. 1530 and 600 BCE (Bronze Age) when the stone walls were likely constructed. From ca. 560 CE onwards, intensive farming was conducted for much of the time. A largely treeless landscape emerged in the late twelfth century CE. Fine-spatial reconstructions of landscape and vegetation dynamics, including the timing of blanket bog initiation, are made. Post-glacial change in the western Dingle peninsula, based on published Holocene lake profiles and drawing on the new information presented here, is discussed. Reported are (a) fossil spores of the filmy ferns Hymenophyllum tunbrigense, H. wilsonii, and Trichomanes speciosum; (b) the first fossil pollen record for Arbutus unedo (strawberry tree) in the Dingle peninsula (540 CE); and (c) the first published records for Fagopyrum fossil pollen in Ireland, indicating that buckwheat was grown at Kilmore in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries.

An extensive drilling campaign to reconstruct a Neolithic landscape in the Ahlen-Falkenberger Moor in northwest Germany made it possible to document a cultural layer beneath a thick layer of bog peat formed by settlement activities, forest pasture or livestock grazing (site Wanna 1603). First excavations revealed finds that correspond to the typical spectrum of a settlement site. Both the typological and the absolute chronological dating, show that it was used between 3300 and 3000 cal BC and is therefore associated with the Funnel Beaker culture (TRB). This makes the site one of the few proven settlements with a preserved cultural layer in the TRB West group. In addition to the archaeological investigations, pedological, botanical and geological studies were also carried out. This made it possible to trace the development of the former coastline, the nearby wetlands and the successive covering of the site by bog peat. A large number of boreholes also made it possible to record the spatial extent of the site. Thus, landscape changes presumably triggered by human use could be identified. The temporal proximity of the settlement and land use to the changes in the landscape also indicates that the choice of settlement site was influenced by the latter. In sum, our research shows that in Wanna 1603 people of the TRB settled near a group of megalithic tombs on an island or pen­ insula in wetlands.

In the Elbe-Weser Triangle, located in the north-west of Germany and framed by the rivers Elbe and Weser, a total of approx. 350 megaliths of the Funnel Beaker Culture (FBC) have been identified. Despite their large number there is little knowledge about the monuments themselves, their architecture or their history of use. This lack of information is partly attributed to widespread destruction or disturbance of the megaliths located in the open landscape during the past centuries. Other monuments have been covered by bog or clay deposits of marine inundations and thus have not been investigated or even found, yet. However, due to intense draining measures within the bog area of Ahlen-Falkenberg, dist. Cuxhaven several megalithic graves were discovered in the past decades, revealing a protected burial landscape of the 4^th and 3^rd millennium BC. This paper focuses on three passage graves, which have been examined in the scope of a research project in the years 2019–2022. The fieldwork has brought to light well preserved elements of the original burial structures, including a protective massive stone packing around the chambers. We were further able to identify and typochronologically date different burial activities of the FBC, as well as activities related to people associated with the Single Grave Culture. The latter seem to have had massive impact on the monuments and their accessibility. In the light of environmental changes in the Neolithic, the reconstruction of the monuments biographies was attempted. In sum the monuments show individual, local and regional traditions that were embedded in a supra-regional FBC network.

A 600 cm peat succession covering the last ca. 10,000 years from Wildseemoor, a perilacustrine ombrotrophic peat bog in the northern Black Forest, offers the opportunity to study Holocene environmental evolution and fire history in the Upper Rhine region. More particularly it is used here for a pilot study 1) dealing with the influence of potential peat growth disturbance on charcoal influx interpretation, and 2) proposing a new approach to disentangle regional from local influences on charcoal influx, based on the internal variability of charcoal particle size variations. The latter suggests a fluctuating local to regional main source of charcoal influx to Wildseemoor. Two plausible age-depth models were established based on seven identified radiocarbon-dated macrofossils, showing either reduced depositional rates or breaks in deposition during the early- to mid-Holocene and (less extensively) the Middle Ages, that are not visible to the naked eye in the sediment sequence. The Holocene Climatic Optimum, a time interval of particular interest with its climate conditions analogue to future projections, falls directly into an extensive period of reduced accretion or depositional hiatus. This severely impacts the interpretation of the charcoal record for that period but highlights potential impacts of climate variations on peat growth. Regardless which age-depth model is used, phases of high charcoal influx were identified after ca. 5,000 cal BP and can most likely be linked to anthropogenic pressure on the region. The findings of this study may be used in future Holocene fire dynamics reconstructions, as they stress the necessity for high-resolution age control, but also the opportunity to exploit periods of disturbed/halting peat growth as a proxy to detect past periods of climate change. Using the internal variability of charcoal particle size to estimate local versus regional charcoal transport tendency showed promising results and may help push forward charcoal record interpretations in the future.

Reliable quantitative vegetation reconstructions for Europe during the Holocene are crucial to improving our understanding of landscape dynamics, making it possible to assess the past effects of environmental variables and land-use change on ecosystems and biodiversity, and mitigating their effects in the future. We present here the most spatially extensive and temporally continuous pollen-based reconstructions of plant cover in Europe (at a spatial resolution of 1° × 1°) over the Holocene (last 11.7 ka BP) using the ‘Regional Estimates of VEgetation Abundance from Large Sites’ (REVEALS) model. This study has three main aims. First, to present the most accurate and reliable generation of REVEALS reconstructions across Europe so far. This has been achieved by including a larger number of pollen records compared to former analyses, in particular from the Mediterranean area. Second, to discuss methodological issues in the quantification of past land cover by using alternative datasets of relative pollen productivities (RPPs), one of the key input parameters of REVEALS, to test model sensitivity. Finally, to validate our reconstructions with the global forest change dataset. The results suggest that the RPPs.st1 (31 taxa) dataset is best suited to producing regional vegetation cover estimates for Europe. These reconstructions offer a long-term perspective providing unique possibilities to explore spatial-temporal changes in past land cover and biodiversity.