Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Quaternary Geography and
the Human Past
Jamie Woodward
A New Quaternary Geography
Research published in the 1990s reshaped fundamental ideas about Quaternary
geography and the tempo of global environmental change. Data from the Greenland
ice cores and from North Atlantic marine sediments show that the last cold stage was
punctuated by a remarkable series of abrupt and high-amplitude changes in climate
and oceanographic conditions (Bond et al., 1993; Dansgaard et al., 1993). These dis-
coveries are driving a new research agenda focused on the causal mechanisms and
how ecosystems and geomorphological processes on the surrounding continents
reacted to such rapid and repeated oscillations in Quaternary climate (Fuller et al.,
1998; Allen et al., 1999; Walker and Lowe, 2007). Some researchers have returned
to previously well-studied sites to scrutinise records at much higher resolution in
order to examine the sensitivity and response of terrestrial environments during
this period (e.g., Tzedakis et al., 2002). It is now clear that these fi ndings have major
ramifi cations for all components of Physical Geography - for geomorphology, bioge-
ography and climatology and how we conceptualise the interactions between them.
These fi ndings have also led to new research questions and new approaches in the
study of human-environment interactions during the Quaternary Period; especially
the Palaeolithic archaeology of the last cold stage (Woodward and Goldberg, 2001;
Gamble et al., 2004; Mellars, 2006; Tzedakis et al., 2007).
Much earlier in the 20th century, in the absence of reliable stratigraphic frame-
works for both the Quaternary and archaeological records, it proved diffi cult to
tackle even very basic questions about the nature of the relationship between Qua-
ternary environmental change and the human past. Peake (1922, p. 6), for example,
outlined some of the central issues at this time:
The problem before us is twofold. Firstly we have to consider whether there was one
ice age or several, and in the latter case how many we must account for. The other
question, upon which opinion is rapidly hardening, is the relation of the different
Palaeolithic periods to the glacial phases.
