Corrigendum to “Human subsistence and land use in sub-Saharan Africa, 1000 BC to AD 1500: A review, quantification, and classification” [Anthropocene 9 (2015) 14–32]

Constraining the Deforestation History of Europe: Evaluation of Historical Land Use Scenarios with Pollen-Based Land Cover Reconstructions

“…The compilation of archaeological 14 C dates can be used to infer settlement patterns in the distant past (e.g., [75][76][77][78]), and it could be possible to interpret this information as a proxy for land use. Incorporating geographical data on diet, social organization, settlement density and other socio-cultural characteristics would also aid in achieving a more accurate distribution of past land use since urbanization [79,80]. Closer in time to the present day, land use and human settlements in the more recent past are easier to distribute in part because landscapes in Europe become "fully occupied", i.e., nearly all of the usable land in a region is under some sort of human influence, and because there is less uncertainty in the population estimates that drive the ALCC models.…”

Quantifying Land Use in Past Societies from Cultural Practice and Archaeological Data

“…This novel means of illustrating land use is designed to translate knowledge of past cultures and human practice into a quantified illustrative format demonstrating the terrestrial footprint of a past culture. Although this paper builds significantly on [22], substantial additions have been made. These have increased the comprehensiveness and complexity of the calculations, particularly in relation to livestock management, crop production and use, population dynamics and secondary products.…”

“…The circle diagrams can further highlight the extent of wild resources exploited through hunting and gathering activities. In cultures where these elements composed a significant factor in land use, such as those that did not practice agriculture and livestock husbandry, this becomes a prominent feature of the quantified land use activities [22]. While the circles reflect the required spatial extent in m 2 , the various land use categories differ in terms of the intensity of land use.…”

“…Not in the least, such a quantification can provide a fundamental bottom-up description of land use categories used in the anthromes concept, and for modeling human-environment interactions. In a review and classification of subsistence livelihoods in Iron Age sub-Saharan Africa, Kay and Kaplan [22] provided a rationale for a new type of land use modeling and performed a quantitative synthesis of the sociocultural characteristics of land use using methods similar to those of Gregg [21]. Instead of presenting the visualization of land use in a rectangle as Gregg does, Kay and Kaplan introduce a new type of visualization called a "circle diagram", where the variety of land uses are presented in a series of nested pie-charts, with individual wedges reflecting specific land uses, and the concentric rings qualitatively illustrating land use intensity.…”

“…The circle diagram illustrates a generalised view of land use given properties of the physical environment that are "typical" for the place and time where the society in question existed; comparisons between circle diagrams therefore reflect both sociocultural and physical drivers. While circle diagrams figure prominently in [22], the theory and computational process behind the circle diagram are not developed in detail in that publication. In the present paper, we set out to explain the circle diagram, and more generally the process of quantifying land use in prehistoric societies, in sufficient detail to allow further application of both the data synthesis method and the preparation of visualizations.…”