Reconstructing Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Hinterland and Lake Shore Socio-Environmental Interactions in the Three Lake Region of Western Switzerland

Within the scope of the project "Beyond lake villages: Studying Neolithic environmental changes and human impact at small lakes in Switzerland, Germany and Austria" special emphasis is put on reconstructing possible scenarios of human-environment interactions in the Neolithic and Bronze Age, ca. 4300-800 cal. BC. Our subproject focuses on the Three-Lakes-Region in Western Switzerland, which was one of the most densely settled circum-Alpine regions during the Neolithic. The extraordinary richness of (bio-) archaeological data from the lake shore villages provides us with reliable information about prehistoric subsistence economy, social organization and, in many cases, with high-resolution dendrochronological dating. The impact of human activities on the environment is constraint by the modes of production of the studied societies. Sociocultural and technological traits are important parameters to investigate this impact of climatic and environmental changes on human societies and vice versa. The “Global Land Use and technological Evolution Simulator” (GLUES) has previously been used to simulate early farming societies' sociocultural development as well as the impact on their environment. GLUES is defined by the adaptive dynamics of the four state variables, population density, technological efficiency, subsistence economy and economic diversity, as well as by the resource utilities for each spatial unit, and by spatial interaction between the spatial units, e.g. migration and diffusion. We employ a new regionally scaled down version of GLUES to estimate population densities, land use and their temporal and spatial relations to environmental change under reconstructed modes of production in prehistoric Western Switzerland. This reconstruction extrapolated from the archaeologically well-known sites to the Hinterland and allows us to investigate the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age societies beyond the lake villages.