ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the natural environmental changes providing where the drama of human evolution and social development played out. It describes the different types of evidence that form the bases for environmental reconstruction and the ways in which these data sources obtained and interpreted. The chapter also considers the methods by which increasingly precise chronological frameworks for recent environmental change. It also describes the pattern of both long-term and short-term climatic change in north-west Europe and North America, and considers the causes of climatic change over a range of temporal scales. It examines the impact of climatic events of the past biotic and abiotic components of northern temperate zone environments. The second part leads a discuss people in the landscape, developed largely through a series of case studies based on the archaeological and ethno historical records.
