Studying Past Human-Environment Interactions using Radiocarbon Databases

To understand the two-way association between humans and environment in the past, quantitative data are needed of both paleoenvironments and past societies. Many paleoenvironmental time series are now available, for example collected from lake sediments, which are quantified from proxy records using a transfer function of some kind. Local, regional, continental and global syntheses are being developed using various proxy-data and using different analytic methods and these provide time series depicting the changes in the environment in the past. To relate these to human activity, a measure of potential human impact is needed, such as population numbers. One method to quantify paleodemography is through the use of databases of radiocarbon dates obtained from archaeological sites. Radiocarbon dates extracted from many archaeological sites are accumulated from the literature, and, if corrections are made for various factors, such as taphonomic loss, these can be used as indices of past population numbers at regional to continental scales. We will discuss some examples of how these databases are being used to understand human-environment interactions in both directions, by showing the association between past climate changes and population numbers and showing how increasing populations and new technologies made subtle, but noticeable changes in the vegetation.