Annually laminated lake sediments provide high-resolution and accurate timescales for reliable paleoenvironmental reconstructions. We investigated human activity in a low-human-impact region of Poland, taking advantage of varved sediments from Lake Szurpiły, which span the last 8200 years. Multiple sediment variables indicated that catchment evolution and lacustrine responses, mainly to changes in forest cover, were divided into four phases. Because of sparse or only seasonal occupation of settlements in NE Poland, human impact in the region was insignificant until ca. 939 ± 55 BC (lacustrine phase I). During Phase II (939 ± 55 BC-AD 1392 ± 38), we recorded an increase in human indicators, reflecting the direct influence of a Yatvingian community. Afterwards, between AD 1392 ± 38 and 1770 ± 30 (phase III), permanent settlements and agricultural land use stabilized. The beginning of the last period (phase IV) was clearly identified by all sediment variables, which responded simultaneously to local human activities. Disappearance of laminae from AD 1858 ± 22 until about AD 1997 indicated disturbance of pre-existing, stable depositional conditions, followed by environmental recovery in the last 20 years. Such recovery may have been related to recent socioeconomic

Sediment layers of uniform age within lakes (isochrones) and their patterns reflect accumulation processes which can be correlated with hydrologic conditions in lake basins. The sedimentary archives in three small dystrophic lakes in northeastern Poland are described based on the correlation of local pollen assemblage zones in cores that were collected from the centers and margins of each lake. Past regional groundwater levels could be discerned from the shape of the isochrones, whether plane parallel or concave in configuration in relation to the lake basin shape. The concave configuration of the isochrones in the studied lakes shows that regional groundwater levels remained mostly high and stable throughout their history. The water levels in each lake during the Late Glacial and throughout the Holocene were different and no single, common water-level fluctuation pattern was identified in the three water bodies. The lack of such a finding suggests that the lakes are influenced dominantly by local hydrological factors.

The Black Death (1347–1352 ce) is the most renowned pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe’s population. However, despite advances in ancient DNA research that conclusively identified the pandemic’s causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death remains limited, based primarily on qualitative remarks in medieval written sources available for some areas of Western Europe. Here, we remedy this situation by applying a pioneering new approach, ‘big data palaeoecology’, which, starting from palynological data, evaluates the scale of the Black Death’s mortality on a regional scale across Europe. We collected pollen data on landscape change from 261 radiocarbon-dated coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located across 19 modern-day European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that a large portion of the population, upwards of half, died within a few years in the 21 historical regions we studied. While we can confirm that the Black Death had a devastating impact in some regions, we found that it had negligible or no impact in others. These inter-regional differences in the Black Death’s mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic, societal and climatic factors that mediated the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the historical ecology of plague, should be a focus of future research on historical pandemics.

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The long-term development of a humic lake ecosystem in Poland was investigated via palaeoecological analyses of age-dated sediment cores. Peat and lacustrine deposit records spanning approximately 12,000 years of lake history were analysed with regard to palynomorphs, plant macrofossils, degree of peat decomposition, Cladocera and geochemistry. Our study demonstrated the difficulty of classifying sediments deposited in humic lakes. We considered it inadequate to classify dy sediment exclusively using macroscopic criteria in the absence of geochemical parameters. Our study of the palaeoecology of the humic lake suggested three primary shifts in its trophic status: from oligotrophy to mesotrophy (Allerød-Boreal), to eutrophy (Atlantic), and to humotrophy (from the Sub-Boreal to the present). The results indicated that shifts in the trophic status occurred in response to climatic changes and factors linked to the catchment. The transformation from a clearwater lake of high trophic status to a humic lake was possible, such that the latter may originate not only from an oligotrophic lake. As a result of our pioneering study, we determined that a humic water body may even develop because of transformation of a eutrophic lake.