Palaeoenvironmental proxies indicate long-term development of agro-pastoralist landscapes in Inner Asian mountains

Abstract

A growing body of archaeological research on agro-pastoralist populations of the Inner Asian mountains indicates that these groups adapted various systems of mobile herding and cultivation to ecotopes across the region from as early as 5000 BP. It has been argued that these adaptations allowed the development of flexible social-ecological systems well suited to the long-term management of these mountain landscapes. At present, less attention has been paid to examining the long-term ecological legacy of these adaptations within the sedimentary or palaeoenvironmental record. Here we present sediment, palynomorph and charcoal data that we interpret as indicating agro-pastoralist environmental perturbations, taken from three cores at middle and high altitudes in the Kashmir Valley at the southern end of the Inner Asian mountains. Our data indicate spatially and temporally discontinuous patterns of agro-pastoralist land use beginning close to 4000 BP. Periods of intensification of upland herding are often coincident with phases of regional social or environmental change, in particular we find the strongest signals for agro-pastoralism in the environmental record contemporary with regionally arid conditions. These patterns support previous arguments that specialised agro-pastoralist ecologies across the region are well placed to respond to past and future climate deteriorations. Our data indicating long-term co-evolution of humans and landscape in the study area also have implications for the ongoing management of environments generally perceived as “pristine” or “wilderness”.

Reviewing the Palaeoenvironmental Record to Better Understand Long-Term Human-Environment Interaction in Inner Asia During the Late Holocene

“…Multiple proxies for grazing also increase in the SG02 core from a forest opening at 2,800 m ASL after ca. 500 BP (Spate et al, 2022). These discontinuous phases of land use also parallel changes in the pollen record from Anchar Lake on the valley floor, where the intensification of agriculture after ca.…”

“…In these cases, new Bayesian age-depth models based on the Intcal20 curve were produced using the Bacon package in R (Blaauw and Christen, 2011;Reimer et al, 2020) prior to data examination (Supplementary Data). Ecological impacts of agropastoralism in the study regions observed by the authors during fieldwork also form an interpretive background to this study (Leipe et al, 2014a,b;Motuzaite Matuzeviciute et al, 2019;Spate et al, 2022). We also review several key palaeoclimate studies to contextualize human activity across the study region.…”

“…Multi-proxy studies from large lakes located in regions more intensively inhabited by past populations provide strong evidence for long-term processes of environmental modification and impact by humans (Tarasov et al, 2019;Leroy and Giralt, 2021). A number of the studies were more specifically oriented toward understanding local patterns of anthropogenic environmental change, using multiproxy indicators to examine human impacts (Beer and Tinner, 2008;Zhang et al, 2015;Spate et al, 2022). Core samples in these studies were generally drawn from smaller swamps, wetlands, or mires with catchment sizes more suitable for understanding local patterns of human land use.…”

“…In the Kashmir Valley, India, three cores taken from middle-to high-altitude pastures investigated the impacts of agropastoralism on the landscape (Spate et al, 2021(Spate et al, , 2022. In the subalpine TM01 record, reductions in arboreal Betula and Juniperus pollen and the deposition of coarser, more poorly sorted sediment after ca.…”

“…In the middle-altitude PH03 record, increases in charcoal influx, sediment size, and grazing-associated pollen and spores increase sharply at ca. 2,200 BP (Spate et al, 2022). Cerealtype pollens are interpreted as the movement of cultivation to middle altitudes, possibly in response to regionally drier climate conditions.…”