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Re: Neolithic/Bronze Age deforestation in UK
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A key example is Salisbury Plain...this seems to have been part of large tracts of open grassland in the south that were continued from the Pleistocene into the Holocene through behaviors of animal herds and human hunter-herders living alongside them .

Salisbury Plain (and other places) should be understood to be anthropogenicaly modified/managed landscapes from the earliest times. The extent of modification includes evidence for populations of tundra-scrub-woodland(conifer) communities surviving as an isolated committees mixed with developing deciduous forest and open grassland - a situation that could only by possible through combined animal/human influence.

It seems possible that the ecologically distinctive patches of surviving tundra-woodland in the south (e.g. Salisbury Plain), contrasting with other regional trees and open-grassland, had significance as a particular habitat and associated meanings for people.

(... insert speculation ...)

Overall, there is a long running debate in North European paleoenvironmental studies as to how we model things like forest-cover from the various available lines of evidence, and a legacy of revived opinion and interpretations ..... A long story...

Take home this :: Thick, dense, climax (fairy-tale type) forest may have been limited in extent.
The role of humans and animals more likely produced a mosaic of high-low and open-closed canopy, possibly with 'park-like' habitats being common (ie grass/herbs with spread-out mature tress and very little understory. Critically, large tracts of grazed-grassland may never have been forested and were part of human-animal migration routes for many 1000's of years.

> > > Neolithic farmers did not have to cut down vast numbers of trees >> they first settled areas which were already NOT heavily forested >> the pollen evidence for largest impacts of deforestation is during Late Neolithic and Bronze Age (and quite likely direct linked to clearance for cattle, rather then crops, which is somewhat less demanding).

I was always amazed at the sheer effort of cutting down climax forest with neolithic axes... turns out they thought the same, and did not bother either :) (if possible). Mass forest clearance is a feature of later prehistory, and occurs in the context of large 'tribal' polities, coercive labor and slavery, and probably at the behest of aristocracy in an increasingly stratified/hierarchical society! A vast/excessive number of ditches (very labor intensive) were also dug in late prehistory, again pointing to the increasing social control exercised by elite aristocrats.[/quote]




(sry guys for repeated post > half post dissapeared and posts went all squiffy :()


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Posted by CR
9th July 2018ce
10:26

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