Mid-Holocene charcoal stratigraphy, fire history and palaeoecology at North Gill, North York Moors, UK

Small pest mires are a favourable medium for the preservation of charcoal records that can be correlated more precisely with past fire history as part of multi-proxy palaeoecological studies. The North York Moors upland has many suitable peat deposits with a well-researched palaeoenvironmental history that offer the potential for high-precision palaeofire studies. We have examined the charcoal and pollen stratigraphy at the North Gill site at a range of spatial and temporal resolutions for the mid Holocene period between about 7k and 4.5k radiocarbon years ago. In an individual core, three size-class charcoal records, large, small and microscopic, reflect the scale and location of local fire events, although the micro-charcoal curve contains a background regional signal of about 10% of the charcoal/pollen ratio. Most micro-charcoal is generated locally and deposited close to its source. At the site scale, spatial comparison of four cores shows a variable relationship between tree pollen and micro-charcoal concentrations, which is an index of the size and intensity of local fire phases. Individual fires cannot be distinguished. Fine-resolution sampling at the millimetre scale resolves major burning phases into discrete sub-phases that may reflect the effects of individual fires at this fine temporal scale. This multi-scale research indicates that detailed charcoal stratigraphies at varying resolutions are capable of interpretation in terms of local, regional and intermediate fire history. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.