In other periods or situations without entrenchment, floodplain fine-sediment sequestration even in upper catchment reaches may have been considerable. Alternative scenarios were created by other activities, for example with mining wastes fed directly out onto steepland valley floors, or fine sediment being retained by regulating ponds, reservoirs and weirs. At the present day local valley-floor recycling in steeper higher-energy valleys seems to be dominant, setting a maximum age for overbank fines on top PD332991 of lateral accretion surfaces or within abandoned channels (the

latter also accreting greater thicknesses of material in ponding situations). Lowland floodplains are dominated by moderate but variable accumulation rates (e.g. Selleck LY294002 Walling et al., 1996 and Rumsby, 2000). ‘Supply side’ factors are far from being the only factor controlling fine sediment accumulation rates at sampling sites, either locally on the variable relief of floodplains, or regionally because of entrenchment/aggradation factors. A final qualification to be added is that to identify episodes of AA formation is not necessarily to imply that they relate simply to episodes of human activity. Climatic fluctuations have occurred in tandem, and periods of AA development may in detail relate to storm and flood periodicity (cf. Macklin

et al., 2010). As has been observed many times (e.g. Macklin and Lewin, 1993), separating human and environmental effects is by Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase no means easy, although erosion susceptibility and accelerated sediment delivery within the anthropogenic era is not in doubt. Anthropogenic alluvia were identified using the latest version of the UK Holocene 14C-dated fluvial database (Macklin et al., 2010 and Macklin et al., 2012), containing 844 14C-dated units in total. Some studies in which dates were reported were focused on studying AA (e.g. Shotton, 1978) as defined here, but many were conducted

primarily for archaeological and palaeoecological purposes. Sediment units were identified as being AA if one or more of six diagnostic criteria were noted as being present (Table 1). Of the 130 AA dated units, 66 were identified on the basis of one criterion, 53 with two criteria and 11 using three. AA units were classified in five different ways: (1) by grain size into coarse gravels (31 units) and fine sediment (99 units in sand, silt and clay); (2) according to anthropogenic activity (deforestation, cultivation, engineering, mining, and unspecified) using associated palaeoecological, geochemical and charcoal evidence (Table 2); (3) by depositional environment (cf. Macklin and Lewin, 2003 and Lewin et al., 2005); (4) by catchment size; and (5) into upland glaciated (85 units) and lowland unglaciated catchments (45 units). The five depositional environments distinguished were: channel bed sediments (13 units), palaeochannel fills (49 units), floodplain sediments (60 units), floodbasins (6 units) and debris fan/colluvial sediments (2 units).