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.