Adaptive connectivity networks across climatic and ecological regimes from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages in the Carpathian Basin

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Investigating long-term archaeological land-use patterns is crucial for understanding how past populations adjusted settlement strategies, resource exploitation, and communication networks in response to environmental and climatic variability. Recent quantitative archaeological research has provided important insights into long-term spatio-temporal social transformations in the Carpathian Basin. Yet the diachronic relationships between communication networks and environmental and climatic changes remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we present a standardized, transparent, and replicable framework to compare relative connectivity across distinct site-distribution patterns, using a center–periphery model derived from custom network analyses spanning the Neolithic to the Hungarian Conquest period (∼8000–1000 BP). We develop and present climatically adjusted and simulated movement networks based on spatially clustered centers, emphasising high site intensities and travel cost efficiency derived from a weighted walking friction model incorporating topography and hydrology. We further compare land-use patterns and socio-ecological persistence with crop cultivation strategies based on carbon and nitrogen stable isotope data from human and animal remains. Our results show period-specific differences in centre–periphery structures and accessibility inequalities, alongside changing associations between archaeological footprints and descriptive environmental classes. These patterns are consistent with repeated reorganisation under changing environmental conditions, rather than with a uniform response to environmental change.

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