Multiscalar socio-ecological modelling of prehistoric and historic period human activities in the French Alps.

This dissertation applies a suite of coarse-grained formal models to the administrative departments four and five in South-Eastern France, the summed probability distribution of radiocarbon dates (SPD), the aoristic analysis of site counts (ASC), and pseudobiomization (PBM), evaluating the results against current landscape-scale interpretations from the Ecrins National Park to test their efficacy in elucidating our understanding of past human behaviour/activities. Previous research has incorporated elements of this methodology to this study area as a part of continental scale assessments of population density (Shennan et al. 2013; Crema et al. 2017), and changes in land-cover (Fyfe et al. 2015). Using these datasets, new SDP’s were produced to include more radiocarbon dates from the Ecrins, previously reported PBM results were replicated to only include sites from within the study area, and ASC was additionally applied, primarily utilizing the PATRIARCHE database, as a multi-proxy analysis of human activity/population density and land-cover change. The results of this research was a broad correspondence between the landscape-scale interpretations from the Ecrins National Park, and the suite of models applied to the study area. Moreover, this dissertation ultimately concludes that the coarse-grained modelling approach employed was by itself only able to elucidate our understanding of broad-scale trends of human behaviour/activities across the study area, due to the scale of the approach taken. However, when combined as a part of a multiscalar analysis, it was a useful tool in integrating landscape-scale interpretations with their regional context.