Terracing is found widely in the Mediterranean and in other hilly and mountainous regions of the world. Yet while archaeological attention to these ‘mundane’ landscape features has grown, they remain understudied, particularly in Northern Europe. Here, the authors present a multidisciplinary study of terraces in the Breamish Valley, Northumberland. The results date their construction to the Early to Middle Bronze Age, when they were built by cutting back the hillside, stone clearance and wall construction. Environmental evidence points to their use for cereal cultivation. The authors suggest that the construction and use of these terraces formed part of an Early to Middle Bronze Age agricultural intensification, which may have been both demographically and culturally driven.

Ecse Mound is a burial mound in the Hortobágy region of eastern Hungary. Built by prehistoric nomadic peoples from the east, it now stands on the border between two modern settlements. The construction of the mound was assumed to be related to representatives of the Pit Grave Culture populating the area between the Late Copper and Bronze Ages. This theory considered similarities in shape, orientation, and stratigraphy of this mound with other absolute-dated ones in the Hortobágy region alone. The mound comprises two construction layers as indicated by magnetic susceptibility and on-site stratigraphic observations. According to detailed sedimentological, geochemical analyses of samples taken from the bedrock, artificial stratigraphic horizons, and the overlying topsoil, there is a marked similarity between the soil forming the body of the mound in both artificial horizons and the underlying bedrock soil. In contrast the pedological, geological character of the modern topsoil is utterly different. According to our dating results, the uppermost stratigraphic horizon is coeval with the absolute-dated mounds in the region, assigning it to the period of the Pit Grave Culture. However, the lower anthropological horizon is older and dates to between the Early and Late Copper Ages.

Non-pollen palynomorphs (NPPs) are identifiable microfossils that survive chemical digestion during pollen extraction and appear in pollen slides. They represent important proxies and indicators of environmental change that can be integrated with pollen studies of landscape history. NPPs have been widely studied in Europe since the 1970s and regularly included in paleoecological studies, whereas in the United States only the most common NPPs have been routinely tallied. The aim of this study is to contribute to the validation of the use of NPPs in the reconstruction of landscape history. We analyzed NPPs in modern and fossil sediment samples from Stonehouse Meadow, located in Spring Valley in the eastern part of central Nevada. We present a total of 64 modern and fossil NPPs, with images and morphological descriptions given for all previously unknown NPPs and a selection of the most important known NPPs. The comparison of pollen and NPPs in the fossil sediments improves our interpretation of the ecological changes of the last 8000 yr.

Successful reconstruction or restoration of formerly cleared landscapes depends on land use history and its legacies. Programmes developed without consideration of these legacies may fail to be effective and lack credibility. However, compiling landscape histories is not simple; our participatory workshops with long-term local residents combined spatial data on landscape change with facilitated conversations to compile a history of landscape change. Timing and extent of key environmental and socioeconomic drivers of woody vegetation cover change since European settlement were established. Some drivers of clearing were relatively well-known, such as drought, or clearing for surface mining and pastoralism. However, others, including important interactions like prolonged drought intersecting with declining wool prices, were less known. These workshops verified provisional data, tested focus and methods, and identified critical time periods for further investigation. The workshops were a powerful transdisciplinary research tool that enhanced the understanding of researchers and participants beyond expectations. Other researchers should consider the general approach when assembling landscape history as a basis for documenting the degree and causes of change.

This article assesses the major changes in landscape and coastline, which took place in an area adjacent to the northern shore of the inner estuary of the river Humber, in East Yorkshire, UK, from the beginning of the Holocene to the Iron Age. It considers the effect of these changes on material culture as represented by artefact distributions, including flint assemblages and polished stone tools located during field survey. The conclusions presented here derive from a continuing programme of research in this study area and they are placed in the context of the wider Humber region and the North Sea Basin. This article advocates a restoration of balance with regard to geographical determinism – a new pragmatism – accepting that environmental factors have a great importance in determining the nature and location of certain activities in the past, though cannot be used to explain them all.