Abstract/Summary

This thesis provides new palaeoenvironmental data from two basins in the Peruvian Andes, and helps the understanding of vegetational, environment, and land-use changes as well as human responses to abrupt climate changes through the Holocene. The basins in Antaycocha and Huarca provide a transect across the Andes region to better understand environmental responses in different climatic zones, as well as aid in the understanding of social responses in different regions across the Peruvian Andes. By using a multi-proxy approach to analysing the wetland archives (stable isotopes, n-alkanes, pXRF, Rock-Eval Pyrolysis), we can better understand how past societies responded to major periods of climate change, such as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) and the Little Ice Age (LIA); but also how the environment responded to periods of pre-historic change through the Holocene, such as at the mid-Holocene drought period and the pluvial phase thereafter. The results of these analyses have shown that pre-Columbian civilisations were able to adapt to the climatic conditions by constructing reservoirs, terraces, and completely changing their agricultural practices during times of abrupt change. This study has also demonstrated that the basins have the potential to undertake high-precision analysis of environmental change and have been able to detect large scale regional climate changes such as the MCA and LIA, but also the short-lived climatic changes such as that of El Niño. This study has also shown the potential of how Rock-Eval pyrolysis might be used in the future, to detect sources of old carbon within sequences. This will have huge impacts on the field of radiocarbon, if proved to be true, as this would enable the field to create more robust chronologies based on better selected age samples.