Demographic Changes, Trade Routes, and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes in the Middle Volga Region in the Past 2500 Years

Abstract

The development of landscapes of the central part of the Middle-Volga region in the last 2500 years was a discontinuous process of the explosive growth of population and land utilization alternating with stages of depopulation and desolation. The periods of depopulation and transitions of cultures occurred at similar times to climate changes. Some cultures were associated with distinct climatic episodes, such as the association of the Dark Ages Cold Period with Hun, post Hun, Heraldic, and Khasarian times, and the Medival Warm Period with the time of Volga Bulgaria. A combination of archaeological and paleoecological analyses allowed us to reconstruct a sequence of landscape and land use changes in relation to the historical development of the region. The first millennium CE was a time of major changes in population, agricultural technologies, social structure, and settlement patterns in the forest-steppe zone. The MiddleVolga region underwent a transition from a non-populated, mainlyforested landscape of first centuries CE to a highly deforested agricultural landscape of the Volga Bulgarian state by the 11th century CE. Within several centuries, the landscape was transformed by shifting cultivation, wood and ore extraction, and the formation and expansion of pastures and road networks. The process of deforestation in the region was facilitated by the relatively warm climates of the Medieval Warm Period.

Soundscape of the Old Tatar Settlement: Historical and Cultural Meanings

“…«After the fall of the Kazan khanate in 1552, on the territory of the Middle Volga region, the Urals and Siberia, the Russian State launched an active large-scale missionary policy towards the Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Mongolian ethnic groups. Its main purpose was to destruct the foundations of Islam, forced Christianisation, Russification…» (Vyazov et al, 2019).…”

The Healthscaping Approach: Towards a Global History of Early Public Health

“…Scholars have also used chronicles to reconstruct environmental conditions and anomalies, sometimes comparing them with modern data that climatologists and earth scientists generated from tree rings, ice repositories and soils (Harvey 1981;Alexandre 1987;Alverson, Bradley and Pedersen 2003;Hoffmann 2014). However insightful such endeavours are, they leave much crucial information on the perception of how nature impacted the wellbeing of communities (Vyazov 2019). For instance, as Trevor Dean (2011) argues, to many chroniclers and authors of travelogues prior to the seventeenth century, extreme weather, sudden increased mortalities and environmental disasters served as moral indicators: for sins committed, or a potential sign of adversity yet to come.…”

On the Paleo-climatic/Environmental Impacts and Socio-Cultural System Resilience along the Historical Silk Road

“…The study from Panyushkina et al (2019) shows that Saka people of the Iron Age employed extensive ravine agriculture on alluvial fans and that they were able to apply simple flow control structures, which certainly reduced water constrains to agricultural expansion in the Lake Balkhash Basin. The steppe landscape in the Middle Volga region was also transformed by cultivation, wood extraction, and the expansion of pastures and road networks in the past 2500 years (Vyazov et al 2019). These examples from the past might help inform the degree to which societies can develop strategies to deal with environmental perturbations at different scales and highlight that social breakdown and collapse are not an inevitable result of transformation.…”