No abstract

No abstract

The Polop Alto valley, in eastern Spain, is characteristic of many Mediterranean landscapes. It has been sporadically reoccupied over the course of at least 80 kyr. Its landforms have undergone various geomorphic processes resulting from late Quaternary environmental fluctuations. During the Holocene, the valley has been modified by millennia of extensive land clearance, cultivation, and terracing. As a result, the evidence for human activity and landuse is a cumulative, but discontiguous palimpsest of the most durable behavioral residuesprimarily stone and ceramic artifacts-whose distributions have been affected by diverse natural and cultural formation processes. Human occupation of the Polop Alto spans the evolution of morphologically modern humans and the replacement of foraging economies by farming, arguably the two most significant biobehavioral transitions for human life today. To better understand the changes in human landuse that accompanied these important transitions, we have employed an integrated suite of techniques aimed at unmixing the diverse formation processes that have affected Polop Alto landscapes and material culture. These include patch-based survey methods, photogrammetry, GIS-based spatial analysis, and using artifact morphology and distribution to assess artifact taphonomy. This has permitted us to develop a diachronic settlement model for the 80 kyr of human occupation in the Polop Alto.

The Polop Alto valley, in eastern Spain, serves as the focus of a study of long-term temporal and spatial dynamics in human land use. The data discussed here derive from intensive, pedestrian, non-site survey. We employ the concept of artifact taphonomy to assess the various natural and cultural processes responsible for accumulation and distribution patterns of artifacts. Our results suggest that the most significant land-use changes in the Polop Alto took place at the end of the Pleistocene and accompanying the late Neolithic, while much less notable changes in land-use patterns are associated with the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition and the initial use of domestic plants and animals in the valley.

In the above paper the title should have read as 'Socioecological dynamics at the time of Neolithic transition in Iberia'.