Few months ago University of Athens (Faculty of Geology and Geoenvironment) hosted a seminar with title "Wood and fire:natural and anthropogenic dynamics. The AGRESPE Project" with Dr Marie-Claude Bal from University of Limoges.

The subject of the reseach was soil charcoal analysis and how you can relate this to an open scenery or not. The topic was really interesting.

I hope that reading this will be helpful!

very interesting question, it makes us to look into the crops/cropping systems, cultivars, inputs management, crop-weather interaction, dynamics of soil environment, productivity of the land use types, .. long past  trends.Paleo-climatology and agri-relationship has to be looked into all these factors, even the insect-pest dynamics has drastically changed

Some indicators, historical result analysis need to be done, very good problem for your PhD, but you have to innovate lot of aspects

regards

Paleoclimate research is usually about understanding Quaternary climate change associated with glaciations - with data from polar, marine sediments and terrestrial environments.   My work has crossed paleoclimate with paleoecology - I use fossil insects to reconstruct past ecologies and climate. There are  many insects associated with the activities of people including farming and food storage and there is a body of literature on this from UK and other parts of Europe. Ina ddition to pollen  you could look at phytoliths as an indicators of past farming practices. For an overview of paleoclimate and some methods check out

Elias, S.A. (editor-in-chief) 2013.  Encyclopaedia of Quaternary Science, 2nd Edition. Elsevier, London, pp 244–254.

 Good luck with your PhD.

"Did the clearing of forests for agriculture, or the ploughing and consequent release of water from the topsoil, cause aridification in the near east (Lebanon through to Afghanistan)?"

Dear Homma,

Your research topic  has few distinctions to make. It's like distinguishing between biology and palaeontology. You have climatology (or climate) = for the present; and palaeo climatology = for the past.  Agric climatology limits this past to the beginning of agricultural period which does not go far back in time as is the case with  natural  vegetation that dates to millions of years. It falls mostly into the latter part of the Holocene- the Anthropocene. Agriculture varies from place to place all over the world often touching on  different civilizations . From here, your climatology or climate studies takes off. Unlike climatology of the present which can be studied using appropriate tools, you may resort to palaeo- proxies for your interpretation of the past climate.

All the best.

Obianuju P. Umeji

Dear Ms. Rostami,

There are many ways you can approach your topic of interest. You can investigate climate and how it may relate to the selection of crops. That is as climate has changed during the middle and late Holocene in a region, you may want to investigate changes in the emphasis on crops in a region. This is however, complicated by the arrival of new crops and peoples in a region as well. In the American Southwest, palynologists have been able to identify the plant grown in fields. They have identified fields devoted to maize, and other crops. Although this is interesting, I find investigating the impact of climate vs land use much more interesting. I have been modeling surface process (erosion) as they responded to climate input, and changes in what people were doing on the landscape. In southern Italy I have been able to model climate caused cycles of erosion. Comparing these with the cycles of erosion dated in alluvial histories, I have found that there are several erosion cycles not related to climate change. These are instead related to human land use impact. The earliest such event in southern Italy occurred when Neolithic grazing first appeared about 7,000 years ago. The second erosion event occurred when land clearance related to the arrival of Indo-European peoples and forest clearance. In addition, I have been able to model the additional impact of human land use upon climate caused cycles of erosion during the last 2,000 years, and arrive at a relative measure for human impact at different times. 

In Iran it would be a significant contribution to not only investigate past human impact upon the landscape through geomorphology, and palynology (track changes in forest composition as people began forest clearance, and monitor the kinds of crops that appear in the record), but to be able to assess the additional impact of human activity upon natural cycles of erosion. If you can arrive at a model of how people have affected landscape dynamics, you may also be able to use it to test current human impact upon the landscape, and predict future impacts of people upon the landscape given current estimates for global change. 

You can increase the precision of your model by using tree-ring analyses to extend your current climate record into the past so that you can calibrate your model, or test it.

Therefore, by linking past climate, and past agricultural practices, you can examine not only how climate affected what people grew, but also how their agricultural practices may have impacted the landscape in both positive and negative ways.

For example, there is a heated discussion regarding the end of the Roman Empire in the central Mediterranean. Some argue that soil deterioration lead to the end of the Empire, but in southern Italy it seems that despite possible landscape deterioration, the region prospered. In order to draw such conclusions we need the kind of information that might find. Remember that although the present is the key to the past, the past can provide examples of long-term impacts of human land use, and crop use that can be used to assess current practices in agriculture.

I hope that this helps....discuss this with Dariush, and Reza, and Dr Azizi. See what they might suggest.

Thank you so much  for valuable guidanceس

There is an argument that anthropogenic global warming began much earlier than the Industrial Revolution, due to the release of greenhouse gases from farming. This idea was fist proposed by Bill Ruddiman. He has posted an update to his ideas at RealClimate here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/03/the-early-anthropocene-hypothesis-an-update/

Debates about the Anthropocene are all the rage now, but it is usually dated to begin in 1950 or at the start of the Industrial Revolution. I do not know how easy it would be for you to investigate the change in greenhouse gases CH4, CO2 and H2O that resulted from the Farming Revolution in the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Valley.