PARENT SESSION
Contributed Oral Session 1: Landscape History
Monday, August 8, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 513 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Legacies of Bronze Age and Medieval Period farming in central Sweden: An archaeological perspective on modern plant communities.

Schaafsma, Hoski^*,1, Briggs, John ¹, ¹ School of Life Sciences, Tempe, Arizona

ABSTRACT- Central Sweden has had continuous human occupation since the retreat of the ice sheets at the end of the last ice age, resulting in a landscape largely shaped by human activities. We measured anthropogenic legacies in modern landscapes that originated from two separate time periods. In several locations temporally sequential agricultural fields are present and not overlapping on local landscapes allowing us to measure the rate of successional processes through the last 4,000 years. Farming has impacted the landscape in the study area since the Bronze Age, 2,000 BC to 500 BC, through the Iron Age, 500 BC to AD 1,000, the Medieval Period AD 1,000 to AD 1500 and into the early 1900s. In this study we included plant communities on agricultural fields from the Bronze Age and Medieval Periods and on the surrounding landscapes. Analysis of plant communities on fields from each of time period found significant legacies are persistent on all of the fields, the legacies are reflected in plant community compositions and cover. Fields from different time periods show different legacies suggesting differential successional paths for each disturbance type. These may be due to age differences and/or different farming techniques in the two time periods that produced a variety of soil disturbances that are persistent through time

Key words: legacies, anthropogenic landscape, community ecology, archaeology