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The lagoon environments were places recurrently visited and inhabited by hunter-gatherer groups throughout different areas of North Patagonia. These places were very important in the life of these mobile groups; they were part of their itineraries and they regularly returned to their shores. The Somuncurá plateau's lagoons (Rio Negro province, Argentina) represent one of these spaces, where, in addition to a vital resource such as water, it can be found a greater variety and biological abundance, facilitating a certain shelter during mobility. The Laguna Azul site is one of these places, where the hunting blinds (known as "parapetos") are the most outstanding anthropic modification of the landscape. In this paper, we present the results obtained from the lithic material recovered from one of these structures, which is the most abundant material in the record. The knowledge about the specific uses of these stone tools, obtained through the functional analysis, is deepened to determine trends in the manufacturing process and designs chosen. The studies developed in this paper will expand the understanding about the technological decisions implemented by the hunter-gatherers that inhabited the Somuncurá plateau during the Late Holocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to reconstruct paleoenvironmental conditions and sea-level changes over the last 5500 years. Multi-proxy investigations of sediment types, foraminiferal records, geochemistry parameters and paleotidal elevation changes were conducted on a short sediment core KHAR1 (225 cm long) retrieved from the intertidal area of the Al-Kharrar Lagoon. The sediment age was determined using 14C dating of marine mollusk shells. Results showed that two prominent warming events during AD 750–1500 and 1750–present and a cooling event during AD 1500–1750 were inferred from the variation of benthic foraminiferal composition in core KHAR1. Before 3000 BC interval, the core sediment was deposited under intertidal–subtidal conditions as indicated by the presence of terrestrial sediments (siliciclastic materials), a decrease in subtidal-deep species and a slight drop in the paleotidal elevation about 0.50 cm below the present lowest astronomical tide (LAT). From 3000 to 750 BC, deep-lagoonal species such as S. costigera, T. trigonula, T. serrulata and S. communis dominated this interval and co-occurred with a decrease in coarse sand and an increase in muddy substrates, indicating a prevalence of subtidal environmental conditions during the deposition of this interval. With the beginning of the 1st millennium, symbiotic (epiphytic) species started to increase, reaching the highest abundances between AD 800 and 1500. This increase in symbiotic species during the AD 800–1500 interval coincided with a stepwise increase in sea level and may indicate the prevalence of seagrasses associated with the occurrence of warm water due to climate warming prevailed in/around the lagoon during the deposition of this interval that corresponds to the 'Medieval Warm Period' (MWP). The MWP was followed by cooler (arid) conditions of the Little Ice Age (AD 1500–1750), causing a decrease in the abundance of the epiphytic species S. orbiculus and P. planatus (up to 14%) and a drop in paleotidal elevations. After this, the modern warming conditions prevailed until the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to present a first assessment of the use of woody vegetation resources for combustion by hunter-gatherer societies in eastern areas of Tierra del Fuego. For this purpose, carbonized wood fragments from the archeological context of the Heshkaia 35 site (Moat Bay, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) were analyzed. Results show a local use of woody material from diverse plant species (Nothofagus pumilio, Nothofagus sp., Drymis winteri, and Maytenus magellanica). A comparison of these results with the data available from other archeological sites of the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego offers a comparative perspective on the management of these resources within the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with landscape and settlement development between ca. 300 BC and AD 600 in a defined area of the northern Czech Republic. Despite favourable natural conditions, human occupation of the area did not begin until the end of the first millennium BC. Natural soil and vegetation development therefore lasted longer than in the traditionally settled lowland areas. Initial settlement activity from the La Tène period caused substantial erosion of deforested luvisols and retisols, well-documented by an accumulation of eroded soil horizons in a local wetland. The erosion process continued for more than 500 years following the end of the La Tène settlement, despite the fact that archaeological research revealed no reliable evidence of occupation prior to the twelfth century AD. Pollen and sedimentary records from the wetland, however, clearly indicate the existence of settlement activity during the "archaeologically invisible" Roman and Migration periods. This case is not unique and underlines the importance of environmental analysis for the detection of settlement history, particularly during periods of poor archaeological visibility or in places that are difficult to research using standard archaeological methods. The change in conditions after the first deforestation and subsequent late prehistoric settlement triggered the degradation of the deforested luvisols and retisols and led to the diversification of the soil cover, which now also includes regosols, gleysols, and truncated luvisols and retisols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses isotopic analyses carried out on human bone samples corresponding to complex hunter-gatherers from the Paraná River basin in northeastern Argentina. Based on the δN and δC values obtained, the dietary patterns of 23 individuals recovered from pre-Hispanic archaeological sites of the Late Holocene are characterized. These sites are associated with the archaeological unit generically called Goya-Malabrigo, which is identified in South America over the entire middle basin of the Paraná River and on a part of the lower river. The values obtained show diets based on depleted δC proteins linked to the C photosynthetic pathway, which is in turn consistent with the isotopic values detected in the main food sources of these human groups: freshwater fishes and continental mammals. The δN values and the results of a multivariate model also indicate a low consumption of plant foods. Although archaeobotanical information from the area has reported maize and other cultigens, the diet of the individuals studied was based on animal proteins, especially on freshwater fish. Moreover, the intake of maize was not isotopically detectable in the human bones analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to discuss conceptual and methodological issues related with the archaeological study of lithic landscapes and exemplify the approach with a case study (artifact distribution data from east-central Argentina). A lithic landscape-understood as the co-occurrence, in a given geographic space, of different structural units each one composed by a raw material source and the complete set of unmodified and human-modified pieces of rock extracted from that source and then transported, used, and discarded across the landscape ( i.e., a scatter area)-can be modeled using kriging, a geostatistical interpolation tool useful for integrating scattered information into coherent spatial models. The case study allows for the examination and discussion of, on one hand, the relationships between the type and location of the sources and the size and shape of the respective scatter areas and, on the other, the reciprocal relationships between different raw materials and sources. It is concluded that a proper description of the spatial structure of a lithic landscape is the needed baseline from which to evaluate different explanatory models. Such models should take into account different sets of initial conditions and generative mechanisms, in order to cope with the pervasive problem of equifinality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatial and temporal land-cover variability within the main cultural landscape units in Denmark during the last 3,000 years. Quantitative estimates of the cover of trees, grasses, Cerealia and Calluna around nine Danish lakes were obtained using the recently developed Landscape Reconstruction Algorithm (LRA) (Sugita , ). The performance of the approach was evaluated by comparing reconstructed vegetation based on a.d. 1800 pollen spectra to land cover from historical maps of the same period. Although the model tended to overestimate grassland cover by 10–20%, the reconstructed vegetation was much more similar to the observed than the uncorrected pollen proportions. The LRA was then applied to 3,000 year long pollen records to reconstruct the vegetation development around each of the nine sites. The results support earlier conclusions regarding the relative stability of woodland, agrarian and heathland dominated landscapes in Denmark (Odgaard and Rasmussen ), with the distribution of the main landscape types determined by topography and soil characteristics. The present study indicates that the transition zones between agricultural and forest dominated landscapes were the most dynamic, acting as buffer zones where most of the expansions and contractions of agricultural activities took place. The quantitative vegetation reconstructions underline the importance of farming and especially pastoral activities in shaping the Danish landscapes throughout the study period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]