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content with the others, but also much unique material. The overall focus of the book i s the interactions between people, environments, and climate that have produced the observed pattern of change, written at a level to suit final-year undergraduates and research students in subjects such as geography and archaeology.

The book begins with a short chapter on scales of time and space and defines the scope of the book, focusing on the ‘northern temperate zone’. The second chapter briefly reviews the wide range of methods available to obtain evidence for past environmental change, and the underlying principles of palaeoecological approaches. Chapter 3 dis- cussed ’natural environmental change‘, meaning climatic change, on time-scales ranging from the whole Quaternary down to the I-ittle Ice Age. Description of orbital forcing of Quaternary climatic change comes within this chapter, although it might have been better placed earlier, as it i s probably the dominant component forcing environmental change on the longest time-scales considered by the book. The fourth chapter looks at the consequences of climatic change in terms of development of ice sheets, sea-level change, and changes in vegetation and soils. Chapter 5 introduces people as elements in the equation of environmental change, reviewing the global history of the evolution of modern humans, and the origins of agriculture and animal domestication. This global view is necessary for this topic, but sits rather oddly next to the north temperate view for most of the environmental change sections. The following chapter discusses human impacts on the environment, includ- ing the late Pleistocene and Holocene extinctions of large mammals and birds (a global view again), Mesolithic forest clearance, and the consequences of the introduction of agriculture in Europe in the mid- and late Holocene, and the late Holocene decline of woodland in North America. The development of non-forest habitat (blanket peat, grasslands) is given special attention. Chapter 7 describes present-day interactions between people, climate, and environment with emphasis on erosion consequences. Having set the scene of modern landscapes as predominantly the outcome of millennia of human activity, Chapter 8 reviews the issues involved in conserving this cultural landscape for the future. It has become conventional for a book of this type to include a final chapter on future change, and Bell and Walker’s work i s no exception. However, the ground is well prepared in the earlier chapters, and their Chapter 9, covering the greenhouse effect and ozone layer, fits well with the rest of the book.

This book is well illustrated, with a mixture of original figures and photographs, and redrawn diagrams from relevant literature. The overall layout is pleasing and attractive. A few of the photographs are too dark, and the book is not error- free, but the overall standard is high. The book is especially welcome for its integration of a palaeoecological and archaeo- logical perspective to provide a view of a planet which, in its present aspect, is undoubtedly dominated by human activity. I suspect that it might be used more in physical geography or palaeoecological courses to illustrate the human factor in environmental change than it will in archaeological courses to illustrate environmental change. Nevertheless, Bell and Walker’s account deserves to do well in an increasingly crowded market.

K. D. BENNETT Department of Plant Sciences

University of Cambridge Downing Street

Cambridge CB2 3EA England

The cultural landscape during 6000 years in southern Sweden-the Ystad project (Ecological Bulletins 41 ) EDITED BY BJORN E. BERCLUND

Publisher Munksgaard, Copenhagen 1992 (496 pp) ISBN 87 16 11 049 8 DKK 700.00

The ‘Ystad‘ project was born at a meeting in Stockholm in 1979, and has culminated in a magnificent book edited by Professor Berglund. He has patiently led a large interdisciplin- ary team of geologists, plant ecologists, archaeologists, historians and geographers and clearly imposed a unifying discipline using his velvet gloves. The reader i s taken step by step through the 6000-yr development of a 29000 ha area that encompasses soil and land-use variation typical for southern Sweden and even parts of Denmark.

At a time of frenzied research effort into global change using the most sophisticated computer simulations one hesitates for a moment to wonder whether we are admiring a dinosaur that has stumbled into the next era of scientific research. The book firmly banishes such heresy. Global data sets are based on sound data, and the Scandinavians give data quality the highest priority. The data collection i s far from aimless - a hypothesis of considerable importance is put to the test, namely that changes in social organisation and environment have proceeded in a tightly linked stepwise manner; and the key question posed - did the changing environment-landscape complex drive these changes or vice versa? In the final sections of the book the implications of the project for landscape ecology, planning and nature conservation are discussed. Indeed the disciplined co-oper- ation between scientists and researchers from arts faculties perhaps heralds a new age when the implications of scientific research become incorporated into the fabric of society in a controlled and disciplined fashion rather than by shock revelation and hysterical response.

The book comprises seven chapters. Berglund himself introduces the project, its aims and hypotheses and the study area. There are no less than 15 subprojects split between six different Arts and Science departments at Lund University. Eleven authors share chapter 2, which presents materials and methods. Special mention must be made of Alan Crozier, who takes responsibility for the English language used in the book. He adopts a sensible approach to the tricky translation of specialist terms, and we are very rarely reminded that none of the authors are writing in their native language - a considerable achievement in almost 500 pages of double column format.

Chapter 3 i s built around 10 hand-coloured maps that summarise vegetation, land-use and settlement patterns from the Late Mesolithic to the present. Some progress is made in identifying complementary trends in both palaeoecological and archaeological data. These two disciplines traditionally sense the landscape at such different scales and with such different methods that many earlier attempts at unification have been frustrated. Problems of interpretation sti l l remain as Tesch and Olausson, commenting on the Late Bronze Age landscape, write ‘what is read in the pollen diagrams as an expansion of the cultural landscape could equally well be

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interpreted, from the archaeological evidence, as a society under stress.‘

A transect of four focal areas is presented in chapter 4, with data presented as pollen diagrams, settlement and landscape maps. Again a major aim is to find points of connection and corresponding patterns between the palaeoecological and archaeological data. There are some successes in the linkage of certain changing settlement patterns and trends in the pollen diagrams, but problems remain. Gunilla Olsson’s model for the agrarian landscape of the Late Bronze Age in Bjaresjo ‘does not account for the extent of deforestation’ suggested by the pollen diagrams. Quite possibly we are again up against a scale mismatch that has dogged pollen analysis for many years. The authors estimate the radius of their pollen source areas to be 1 km around lakes that are approximately 2 and 15 ha respectively. I find this figure to be very conservative, and of course the source area will vary widely between pollen types. With the benefit of hindsight I would have selected even smaller basins for these comparisons. However, when the transect is viewed as a whole we are better tuned to the sensitivity of the pollen diagrams and striking contrasts are apparent in all data sets.

Heartbeats can race among Scandinavian archaeologists when slash-and-burn or landnam come under discussion. Gaillard and Goransson see no need to invoke these concepts for the Neolithic in this area. The significant charcoal records are put down to natural fires and forest clearance. Their hypothesis might be testable by detailed local studies from turf layers in tombs, such as those recently undertaken in Denmark. The contrast between the abundant charcoal in lake sediments at Bjaresjo and its virtual absence from those at Krageholm (further inland) is particularly striking. Research into fire history using other types of site would yield interesting results.

Specific problems and processes highlighted by the data are taken up in chapter 5: palaeohydrology (Gaillard and Digerfeldt), erosion (Dearing) and a range of archaeological, historical and landscape issues. The changes in water-table recorded in the project are shown to correlate with the regional record, and probably therefore under climatic control. The authors are reluctant to propose that this had a decisive influence upon land-use. One suspects that comparison of the well-dated, stratigraphic record with archaeological data, which is inevitably more patchy in space and time, confounds the analysis of simple cause and effect.

Chapter 5 finishes with an imaginative use of the pollen and charcoal data interpreted in terms of landscape ecology. Graphs are presented of changes in vegetation diversity, numbers of invading taxa in each 500-year period, compari- sons of groups of trees characteristic of different successional stages, and changes in abundance of woodland herbs, wetland vegetation and a range of non-woodland vegetation types. The relationship between human disturbance and biodiversity is briefly discussed, showing how the rationalisation of land- use during the present century and subsequent reduction of grassland species was preceded by hundreds of years of increasing diversity of the herbaceous flora resulting from human intervention. We now have the power to change the landscape very rapidly, but we have inherited a landscape that was far from virgin. The precise aims of current nature conservation need analysing, using the long-term perspective presented by this book. I was excited in this section by the contribution of palaeoecology to current ecological issues.

The initial hypothesis i s evaluated in chapter 6, and the authors conclude that ’in general, landscape changes . . . are caused by changes in society’. The crises that society has faced through time have been provoked by social factors,

leading to overexploitation and nutrient depletion. These crises have been overcome by socio-economic reorganisation and application of new technology - a precedent for handling our current crisis. The conclusion that man has been master of the changing environmental conditions in the Ystad area up to the present will surprise some people. It i s a stimulating contribution to the debate of whether climatic change or man has been the major factor in Holocene vegetation dynamics in Europe. However, this book will principally be remembered as the ultimate expression of interdisciplinary collaboration between human and natural scientists, success- fully welded together by an experienced professional.

I warmly recommend this book to all those interested in landscape and the time perspective. It is the key to a vast hoard of knowledge: at the time of printing, nearly 270 publications had originated from the project. The excellent quality of the printing, maps and diagrams is symptomatic of the painstaking planning and data collection that characterises the best Scandinavian research.

RICHARD BRADSHAW Faculty of Forestry

Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Box 49

S-230 53 Alnarp Sweden

The ecology of recently deglaciated terrain: a geoecological approach to glacier forelands and primary succession 1. A. MATTHEWS

Publisher Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992 (386pp) ISBN 0 521 36109 5 f60

Anyone who has spent any time with John Matthews, particularly on or near the Storbreen glacier foreland in southern Norway, will find it of no surprise that the enthusiasm which he has always shown for glacier foreland studies has manifested itself in book form. It will be of no less a surprise to find the result an all encompassing review with an unquestionable evangelical form. The principal aims of the book are succinctly summarised in the final chapter, primarily an attempt to bring together all the literature on the ecology of recently deglaciated terrain, and, secondarily, to espouse a geoecological approach to ’provide an integrated and interdisciplinary theoretical framework for this research‘. Matthews is a geographer, in many ways an ‘old-school’ geographer, to whom spatial arrangement in the landscape, and interrelationships between environmental factors is of paramount importance. Thus he sees many of the overtly biological approaches to modelling and understanding plant succession, the key characteristics of recently deglaciated terrain, as being ‘flawed by the emphasis given to biological processes’ (p. 307). In the book this view is further emphasised by the fact that not until Chapter 5, almost half way through the text, is plant succession per se discussed in depth.

Following a brief introduction to glacier forelands, suc-