ABSTRACT
The prehistoric environment is often perceived as natural and wild. By later prehistory, however, few environments were passive backcloths to human activity; most had been, or were being, fundamentally changed by people. Here we are concerned with the environments of the first millennia Bc and Ad over much of Europe, extending from the British Isles to the Black Sea and from southern Germany to the Mediterranean. Most of the evidence reviewed is from the western half of this area, in parts of which humanly created ‘cultural landscapes’ had come about thousands of years before with the activities of the first farmers. In other instances major changes resulted from deliberate actions during the period in question.
