Environmental dynamics, population history and the terraced agro-landscapes of mountainous Dagestan

Abstract

The mountainous Dagestan region of the North-Eastern Caucasus has a unique historical development based in independent cereal domestication and terraced agriculture. However, there is little to no data on the nature and timing of environmental changes throughout the settlement history of this region. In contrast to the much-studied neighboring Caucasus regions, Dagestan remains mostly unexplored from the standpoint of paleoecology. In 2017, we investigated a detailed radiocarbon-dated 185 cm peat sequence from the Shotota swamp located in the mountainous zone of the Dagestan. Sediments of the swamp span most of the Holocene (about 9000 years) from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, and let us, for the first time, study Holocene vegetation history of the Eastern Caucasus. The results of the study showed significant discrepancies in the timing and sequence of the expansion of tree species in the Holocene in comparison with Transcaucasia and the Western Caucasus. According to data from the second swamp, Arkida, we found that the vegetation of the adjacent flat parts of Dagestan was dry and treeless for the last four thousand years. With the data obtained on the environmental dynamics of vegetation, we conducted a coupled analysis of climate dynamics in Dagestan. One of the phenomena of the ancient development of mountainous Dagestan is the largescale terracing of slopes, which from the Middle Ages completely transformed the territory into agro-landscapes.