Transforming Landscapes of Southwest Anatolia: Modeling Social and Environmental Change from the Middle to Late Holocene Using Predictive Land-use and Cropland Reconstructions

The suitability of landscapes to accommodate various human subsistence strategies is dynamic, and the result of complex interactions between natural and human factors that are difficult to reconstruct from palaeoenvironmental data alone. The long-term multidisciplinary nature of datasets common to archaeological research, though, can provide unique insights into landscape change over time. In particular, the material record can help to mitigate the difficulty of creating spatially explicit reconstructions of past landcover associated with human land-use practices. 

In the following dissertation, a methodology for this purpose is presented using the case of the study region of the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project on the northern fringe of the Western Taurus Mountains in southwest Anatolia, where more than three decades of landscape research have been undertaken. From the extensive settlement record, predictive models using the LAMAP method (Carleton et al. 2012; Carleton et al. 2017) were first tested for their overall utility, and then trained with site data comprising exclusively locations where agricultural land use occurred during distinct periods in the past in order to assess the changing relative suitability for agriculture of the mountainous landscapes over the previous two and a half millennia. In three catchment areas, dated fossil pollen assemblages were then used to create mean cropland estimates for each period using the REVEALS model (Sugita 2007a; 2007b). Subsequently, the predictive surfaces indicating the agricultural potential of these areas were used to reconstruct the spatial distribution of cropland based on the suitability of land parcels as informed by the observable patterns of past human behavior in the study area. In this way, by using archaeological site data specifically indicative of agricultural land-use practices, we can effectively reconstruct the past agricultural potential of landscapes and their spatial organization within the economic and subsistence frameworks of the past.