Insights into the late Holocene vegetation history of the East European forest-steppe: case study Sudzha (Kursk region, Russia)

Abstract

Today the East-European forest-steppe is an agricultural landscape with very few remains of the former natural vegetation. The history of the transformation from natural vegetation to a human-made landscape in the area of Sudzha (Kursk region, Russia) is studied here. Therefore, we compare the off-site pollen record Sudzha with three on-site pollen records obtained from the archaeological site Kurilovka-2. The sediment core Sudzha covering the last 2500 years was taken from an oxbow lake in an area with archaeological sites of the early Slavonic period (3 rd-8 th cent. CE). The Sudzha pollen record indicates dominance of broadleaf forests and meadow steppes in the area from 2500 to 200 cal yr BP with two major settlement phases one between ~2000 and 1600 cal yr BP (~50 BCE to 350 CE) and the other between 1100 and 600 cal yr BP (850 to 1350 CE) followed by a total deforestation and transformation to an agricultural landscape over the last 200-300 years. Noteworthy, however, the record Sudzha does not provide an intensive signal of human impact during the main settlement period of Kurilovka-2 (3 rd-8 th cent. CE). This points to a quite restricted spatial influence of the Early Slavonic settlements on the vegetation, leading to a relative low contribution of palynological anthropogenic indicators to the regional pollen rain signal.

The transformation of the forest steppe in the lower Danube Plain of south-eastern Europe: 6000 years of vegetation and land use dynamic

“…The composition and structure of mid to late Holocene vegetation of the eastern Lower Danube Plain resembled, to a large degree, that of other European forest steppe areas, although particularities also exist. Whilst in central eastern European forest steppe, Quercus and Carpinus betulus were the dominant tree species with a lower occurrence of Tilia, Ulmus, Corylus and Pinus (Magyari et al, 2010;Feurdean et al, 2015;Kuneš et al, 2015), on the Eastern European Plain, Tilia and Quercus, and in some places Pinus, were the dominant tree taxa (Kremenetski et al, 1995;Novenko et al, 2016Novenko et al, , 2018Shumilovskikh et al, 2018Shumilovskikh et al, , 2019. Forests in the Black Sea region also included thermophilus taxa i.e., Quercus cerris, C. orientialis (this study, Marinova et al, 2006;Tonkov et al, 2014) Remarkably, Carpinus orientalis was found to be significantly more abundant around the Black Sea coast i.e., Romania (20%), Bulgaria (>5%), or with only scattered occurrences in Ukraine, whilst it was absent from Central European forest steppe.…”

Woodland use in treeless landscapes? A compilation of botanical data from NE Iran during the Sasanian Empire

“…There is clear evidence for such over-exploitation from a range of territories. Pollen data in the forest-steppe zone in the Eastern European Plain (Novenko et al, 2015(Novenko et al, , 2016Shumilovskikh et al, 2018Shumilovskikh et al, , 2019Lukanina et al, 2022) demonstrate that the first destructions of the forests occurred in the Iron Age, leading to total deforestation for agriculture in many areas within the last 300-500 years. Eastern Mediterranean records from Turkey point to similar developments (van Zeist and Bottema, 1991;Shumilovskikh et al, 2016b).…”