Six Thousand Years of South Asia: Implications for Climate Modeling.

Summary

We review the archaeological evidence for land use patterning in South Asia over the past 6,000 years as part of a larger effort of the PAGES-supported Landcover6k and LandUse6k project to reconstruct global land use and land cover data sets for the purpose of improving models of anthropogenic land cover change used by climate scientists. Here, we use archaeological and paleoecological data from our study areas to trace land use shifts from the Southern Neolithic through the Middle or Precolonial Period and discuss their relationship to antropogenic land cover change. Our data demonstrate an intensification and expansion of agricultural and pastoral land use during this period. We suggest that this pattern characterizes many regions of South Asia that these changes significantly altered both land cover and other environmental conditions during the mid to late Holocene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• LandCover6K: Using Archaeology to Improve Climate Models

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16201