Simulating the nature of vegetation communities at the opening of the Neolithic on Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland — the potential role of models of pollen dispersal and deposition

The landscapes of the extreme western fringe of the European seaboard provide significant challenges to the reconstruction of prehistoric landscapes. The landscapes that exist today often bear little resemblance to those that existed in the middle Holocene owing to a combination of climatic and human influences on the landscape, and there are few surviving landscapes which offer an analogous vegetation situation. The coast of Co. Mayo in Ireland provides perhaps one of the biggest challenges in this regard, being now virtually treeless and covered with extensive tracts of ombrotrophic peat. Palaeoecological data sets indicate extensive woodland in the past in these areas, and the archaeological record shows that the region supported Neolithic populations practising early forms of agriculture. Landscape reconstruction using models that relate pollen dispersal to vegetation communities offers a potential stochastic insight into the nature of former landscapes. The results presented here from a modelling approach to reconstructing earlier prehistoric landscapes clearly demonstrate likely spatial vegetation patterning which could produce pollen assemblages comparable to those in the sub-fossil record. Areas such as Achill Island would have had extensive woodland cover dominated by taxa such as pine, oak and elm, a landscape substantially different from that which exists today. It is argued that at the onset of clearance during the Neolithic the area would have been significantly more attractive to agriculture than it is today.