ABSTRACT
One of the persistent goals of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research in Central Africa has been the development and production of regional maps of past vegetation cover and human demographic or technological changes. Interest in developing the big picture is natural, but there is a mismatch between the quality of the datasets available and tools available to create regional reconstructions. Our tools are sophisticated, but our maps necessarily rely on a substantial degree of extrapolation, which risks obscuring variation in forest types, settlement strategies, and the process of Holocene forest settlement by humans. Furthermore, our approach to hypothesis testing tends to rely on chronological finger-matching between palaeoenvironmental and archaeological records or post-hoc appeals to ethnographic and ecological analogies. We use recent developments in mapping and defining African forest types to support an assessment of published palaeoenvironmental records, from which we can reconsider the regional subdivisions of the tropical forest zone and its relevance for human settlement during the Holocene and beyond.
