Mountainous vegetation succession and land use during the last millennium in the Peloponnese (southern Greece): Environmental change and economic development in an isolated periphery

ABSTRACT Mediterranean mountainous areas and their valuable natural resources have long been attractive to human societies. The Peloponnese (southern Greece), with its complex topographic and climatic variability, has been the scenery for the development of numerous human communities. The existing paleovegetation records from the region derive mainly from lowland sites, while the vegetation succession of the mountains is not clearly understood. Herein, we focus on the sediment profile of Rakita, a wetland located in an isolated mountain basin in the northwestern Peloponnese. We combine pollen‐based vegetation reconstruction with detailed historical and archeological data and analyze them within a broader well‐connected region of the Peloponnese, characterized by an extensive coastline and central location in the Mediterranean trade system. In particular, we contextualize the pollen data with the detailed taxation registers, cadastres, and censuses produced by the Ottoman and Venetian authorities, which recorded agricultural production and population. The high‐resolution pollen profile covers the last 1100 years, and thus we are able to look at more than a millennium of socioeconomic change that witnessed a variety of political and economic systems that controlled the Rakita upland area. We are able to study how these different systems impacted the area of Rakita, which has sizable environmental potential for human exploitation, yet is not easily accessible, and therefore not the first choice for human actors whose goal was to maximize agricultural production of the region. We discover that a smaller scale non‐imperial but deeply market‐oriented political system of the late medieval period, such as the Principality of Achaea, was more successful in intensifying land use even in such isolated locations as Rakita than the large imperial systems of the Byzantine or Ottoman empires, even during their most intensive phases of growth.