ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how historical geomorphologists reconstruct past changes in landscapes using the methods of stratigraphic and environmental reconstruction, including topographic chronosequences, often hand-in-hand with dating techniques and numerical modelling. It points out how some landforms and land surfaces survive or persist for thousands or even millions of years, in either relict or buried form, from long-past climatic and environmental regimes, and the processes that created them are no longer active or detectable. It also describes the wealth of dating techniques now available in the geomorphologist's toolkit for studying past geomorphic events and old landforms. Finally, it shows how contingency gives a historical and spatial context to geomorphic changes, pinning forms and processes to particular places and specific times, and noting that contingency acts over all timescales, with its effects sometimes being striking over the long term, because Earth history is full of unexpected events that partly dictate what happens later.
