Understanding human-environment interactions in space and time: 3 case studies from the Holocene in Australia

Understanding human-environment interactions has emerged as a prominent research agenda within both archaeology and palaeoecology. Palaeoenvironmental research has demonstrated the important role that climate has in determining the development and distribution of ecosystems, however the impact of humans on ecosystems and of environmental change on humans remains contentious, particularly when studies of environmental change are conducted in isolation from archaeology. Here we present three separate analyses of human-environment interactions through time in Australia that are focussed at range of spatial scales: local, regional and continental. We highlight a tight coupling between palaeoenvironmental change and human population dynamics at all of these scales in the case studies and attempt to disentangle the reciprocal relationships between environmental change and human activity. The governing question underpinning this presentation is: how does the information provided by palaeoecology and archaeology about human-environment interactions through time vary with the spatial and temporal scale of the primary data? © The Author