ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the role of climate as the dominant influence on later Holocene erosion history, have attributed greater influence to the role of people. The key to the relationship between sediment supply and river to transport the eroded sediment affected by climate, runoff and vegetation. The occurrences of erosion forms a problem in human terms, rate is greater than that of soil formation. Erosion episodes are increasingly well dated using optical dating and extensive 'archaeological type' trenching relates sediments to archaeological and historical evidence for land-use and climate. It is clear from the quantities of artefacts in many agricultural soils that prehistoric communities responded to decreasing soil fertility by manuring, and by medieval times there is plaggen, or man-made, soils. Human responses to erosion events are not, however, always as predicted by a deterministic perspective.
