Multi-proxy Palaeo-environmental and Topographic Landscape Reconstruction in East London

Abstract

Abstract Small and large scale projects have provided high resolution, site specific palaeoenvironmental evidence that needs integrating and placing into a wider environmental context for floodplain development and changing Early Holocene climate in the Thames valley. This has been attempted with a number of regional models for the Lower Thames Valley. However, these broad models need more site specific landscape studies in order to refine the regional resolution of the models and to accommodate more useful high resolution perspectives of changing landscape, which would have been apparent to past people. Despite this, the assumption that once we have one sequence we know the whole story for an area still persists. Here, lithologically similar sequences, between the Isle of Dogs and Canning Town, are used to show different environments and pressures on landscape change. If viewed independently an apparently similar sequence occurs at all three sites but when placed within the past topographic template it becomes clear that each site occupies a different landscape position with respect to the contemporary river. It is suggested that this is the way forward for the construction of a human-scale picture of the evolving prehistoric floodplain and to better understand the human activity that took place within it.