Situated in the Alpine Foreland, Lake Steisslingen provides sediments covering the last 16,000 sidereal years. The exceptional value as an environmental archive is due to large laminated sections, found in several long cores. Counting of... more
Situated in the Alpine Foreland, Lake Steisslingen provides sediments covering the last 16,000 sidereal years. The exceptional value as an environmental archive is due to large laminated sections, found in several long cores. Counting of organic varves allowed the establishment of a detailed varve-based age model. A high-resolution pollen analysis for the period 5457 BC to 813 AD was carried out and compared with an archaeological mapping of a 5 km radius around Lake Steisslingen. The combined interpretation of the palynological and archaeological evidence facilitates a reconstruction of the settlement history and the evolution of the landscape over the last eight millenia. Several important aspects of vegetational and settlement history are illuminated: The mathematical ordination method of correspondence analysis is used to extract the main dimension of explanation from the pollen data. A single curve is generated and thought to reflect human impact. The validity of this assumed proxy is tested against the vegetational and archaeological evidence of the micro-scale area since Neolithic times. From the Steisslingen example, we conclude that human impact is the most important and, in a mathematical sense, continuous factor in vegetational development of those landscapes, which are settled since prehistoric times.
