Review on vegetation, landscape and climate changes in the Carpathian Basin during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic period

Vegetation History and Archaeobotany https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-024-00986-w REVIEW Review on vegetation, landscape and climate changes in the Carpathian Basin during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic period Enikő K. Magyari1,2 · Pál Raczky3 · Máté Merkl2 · Ivett Pálfi2 · Gabriella Darabos2 · Maria Hajnalova4 · Magdalena Moskal‑Hoyo5 Received: 28 April 2023 / Accepted: 20 December 2023 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract The Neolithic and Copper Age (CA) of Hungary (6000–2800 cal bc) represents a meticulous construction of settlement structure, material culture, arable farming and herding techniques with at least one, but likely several reappearing population movements that brought in innovations and possibly contributed to the societal changes in this period. The last couple of decades witnessed a considerable progress in the study of concurrent vegetation, climate and landscape management changes particularly via the increased number of high-resolution pollen records, archaeobotanical and archaeological investigations, coupled with stable isotope analyses of the charred cereal assemblages. In this review we synthetize the results of these research projects and demonstrate that the Neolithic and CA landscapes of Hungary were characterised by mixed oak forest communities, and in the territory of Hungary thermophilous steppe oak forests were present in the lowland landscape that were the principal choice of early farmers represented by the Körös-Starčevo-Criş cultures. Climate modelling and climate reconstruction from these regions indicate higher than preindustrial summer mean temperatures and higher than modern summer rainfall. We demonstrate that Linear Pottery Culture was the first culture that technologically advanced to clear larger plots of land for crop cultivation purposes. The first large scale and landscape level clearance is discernible in the Hungarian pollen records in the Late Neolithic period, when population size likely reached its Neolithic maximum, both in the lowlands and the surrounding mid-mountains. Keywords Neolithic · Vegetation change · Climate · Hungary · Pollen · Archaeobotany Introduction Communicated by W. Tinner. * Enikő K. Magyari 1 ELKH-MTM-ELTE Research Group for Palaeontology, Ludovika Tér 2, Budapest 1083, Hungary 2 Department of Environmental and Landscape Geography, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter Stny 1/C, Budapest 1117, Hungary 3 Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Múzeum Krt. 4/B, Budapest 1088, Hungary 4 Department of Archaeology, Constantine the Philosopher University, Hodžova 1, Nitra 94974, Slovakia 5 W. Szafer Institute of Botany, Polish Academy of Sciences, Ul. Lubicz 46, 31‑512 Kraków, Poland Since the work of Willis and Bennet (Willis and Bennett 1994), the question whether Neolithic populations of the Aegean, Balkan and Carpathian (ABC zones) (Chapman and Souvatzi 2020) shaped their natural environment in a way that moved these ecosystems out from their safe operational space and influenced their natural climate-induced succession, comes up repeatedly (Magyari et al. 2012; Chapman 2018; Sümegi et al. 2020) without a satisfying unequivocal answer. According to Kaplan (Kaplan et al. 2011), subsistence required a relatively large area until about ~ 500 cal bc due to technological limitations (ca. 6.5 ha/capita), while the archaeological literature estimates Late Neolithic (LN) population agglomeration in the ABC zone just under 1,000 individuals in one settlement (Müller et al. 2016). The only exceptions are the LN Trypillia megasites in the Ukrainian Pontic forest steppe region, where earlier estimates suggested > 10,000 capita per settlement (Müller et al. 2016), Vol.:(0123456789) Vegetation History and Archaeobotany but recent research raised the possibility of pilgrimage or seasonal assembly as the main function of these sites with a restricted long-term settlement activity (Albert et al. 2020; Gaydarska et al. 2020). Ongoing archaeobotanical and archaeozoological work, on the other hand, attests to permanent settlement and well-developed agro-pastoral communities (Makarewicz et al. 2022). In addition, it was demonstrated (Bogaard et al. 2007, 2013, 2019) that until the invention of plough and animal traction during the 4th millennium bc, arable farming tended to be labour intensive (hoe-farming), incorporated manuring and was integrated with small-scale herding. This finding overall suggests that particularly in the Early (EN) and Middle Neolithic (MN) the visibility of small populations with relatively small fields (gardens) at site-proximity will likely remain difficult to notice using landscape level methods, such as pollen analysis. The transformation of farming from a labour-limited to a land-limited agriculture took place during the 4th millennium bc, in the Aeneolithic/Chalcolithic Period (~ Copper Age in Hungary; Bogaard et al. 2019) south of the Great Hungarian Plain (GHP) with the invention of plough and animal traction. This is the turning point, at which we expect an intensification of land use and possibly forest clearance to enlarge available arable land and possibly also pastures, the latter due to the demand to maintain larger herds. It remains however questionable when this transformation towards increased animal power use with larger arable fields became the main motivation for keeping more cattle. According to our current knowledge, LN societies (Table 1) of the GHP (Tisza-Herpály-Csőszhalom cultures) and Transdanubia (Lengyel Culture) have not yet used plough and animal traction, but towards the end of the Aeneolithic/Copper Age (CA), people of the late Lengyel-Balaton-Lasinja and Baden cultures introduced animal traction, ploughing and wagons (Klimscha 2017), as suggested by the finding of a twin-yoked oxen copper animal statuette in northern Slovakia (Liskovská cave, Struhár et al. 2010) and numerous wagon and wheel models at Late Copper Age (LCA) Boleráz and Baden sites in Hungary (Soproni 1954; Ilon 2001; Horváth 2010; Bondár 2012, 2013). In addition to this, new archaeozoological data from 11 sites from the Balkans prove that between 6100 and 4500 cal bc there was a longer history of the use of cattle for ‘light’ traction (Gaastra et al. 2018). The earliest date of wagon use in the Carpathian Basin (CB) is assumed to be around the mid 4th millennium bc (~ 3500 cal bc; Bondár 2012). This inference was also supported by Țurcanu (2020) who proved that the cultures in the Balkans and the CB (Ariuşd-Cucuteni-Trypillia cultural complex) were already familiarized with animal traction before its exponential dissemination towards the end of the 4th millennium bc. In the GHP, a clear change of the material representation of prestige is discernible for the LCA at 3600/3500 cal bc, when instead of copper and gold objects in the earlier Tiszapolgár and Bodrogkeresztúr graves, the deposition of paired cattle burials and clay cart models indicate a new ‘nomad (...truncated)