摘要：The artickle reconstructs the history of human occupation on the Volga River bend adjacent to the Zhiguli archaeological site and burial ground based on the pedological, ichnological, and anthrocological study of the site’s occupation layer and the stratozems accumulated in a ravine downstream from the site. 7 cycles of erosion and accumulation occurred in the ravine during the Holocene. Each cycle began with forest fires, leading to the increase in runoff and ravine incision, and ended with the stabilization of the surface as grassland or forest was reestablished. The cycles correlate with periods of human occupation of the catchment area, rather than climatic change. The length of periods between changes of land use varied from a few decades in the agricultural cycles of the early Middle Ages, up to several hundred years in the nomadic-pastoral cycles of the Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and the late Middle Ages. Vegetation changed within every cycle as the human utilization of the watershed resulted in elimination of the understory, reduction of tree-species richness, increase in the proportion of conifers, and, due to combination of fire and grazing led to deforestation. Our study indicates that a long deforestation period occurred for the middle Holocene (Eneolithic— early Bronze Age). A new period of progressive deforestation began in the middle of the first millennium AD. The first traces of the typical steppe inhabitants, the burrowing rodents, are found in the soils of this age. Discontinuities in human occupation lasting a few hundred years occurred in the middle Holocene. Shorter breaks (less than a century) occurred between the Scythian-Gorodets period and the Imenkovo-Khazar period, later between the Khazar period and the Bulgarian period, and in the period preceding the Russian colonization of the area in the sixteenth century.
