PONE-D-21-14576

Take a seed! Revealing Neolithic landscape and agricultural development in the Carpathian Basin through multivariate statistics and environmental modelling

PLOS ONE

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In making your revisions, please pay particular attention to the comments of the second reviewer, who makes several recommendations, including to discuss the potential biases due to research history rather than modern land use, to include the equations used for some of the analyses, and to explain the results of hydrological and topographical site location preferences better in the Conclusions. I also concur with this reviewer that the data sharing leaves something to be desired. I understand that you cannot share the raw data with the whole world, and that this is quite common in archaeology, but it would be great to include at least a person of contact that deals with data requests, to at least make it less bureaucratic for others to try to obtain the data.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The present text is an important contribution to the understanding of the neolithization process in the Carpathian Basin. Together with the hydrological conditions, the quality of the soil is one of the most important location factors for early farming societies. Since I am not a specialist in the field of statistical procedures, I would recommend involving another expert with technical expertise. The conclusions from the investigation are definitely very useful and understandable.

Reviewer #2: This article aims to model and analyse the relationship between site locations and a range of environmental variables during the Neolithic period in the Carpathian basin. Specifically, around 3000 sites were taken into consideration with the aim to elucidate on a range of environmental properties of the site catchment compositions during the Early (EN), Middle (MN), and Late Neolithic (LN) periods. The environmental variables that have been taken into consideration as spatial covariates are soil units, elevation, slope gradient, and hydrologic system.

As far as I can judge, the manuscript is well written in standard English. It is also well referenced, but some terminology (e.g. relating to geological units, soil units) may not be accessible to non-specialists. The author uses a range of spatial analysis techniques that are presented in sufficient detail and/or well referenced for expert-to-expert communication, but I believe that at least some of these methodological explanations will not be accessible to non-specialists either. As far as I am aware, the results in the article are original (i.e. not reported elsewhere).

The R code that the author uses for data analysis is published in full detail within the article. As such, the analyses carried out are in principal reproducable. A big BUT here is that data are only “available from the Hungarian National Museum Institutional Data Access / Ethics Committee …. for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data”. This is certainly not an ideal situation in terms of data reuse.

The article forms a unique contribution to the study of the Neolithic period in this area. To my knowledge it is a first in shedding light on the patterns of settlement location and intensity in this region by basing itself on a large number of settlements and detailed environmental and multivariate quantitative statistics. As aimed, it manages to detail changing soil, hydrological and topographic site location preferences during the Neolithic period in the region. It is certainly a welcome contribution to research on human-environmental relations in general and that on the Neolithic of the Carpathian basin more particularly. The title of the article fits the content well.

The article uses a range of point pattern and statistical analysis including the inhomogeneous G-function, Ripley’s inhomogeneous K-function, Kernel density estimates, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS-test) and the Vargha-Delaney A-statistics (VD-A) to assess how much settlements distributions in different periods deviate from Complete Spatial Randomness and how they co-vary with a range of environmental variables listed above. This is thorough methodologically, but I have one major reservation about the overall methodology still regarding the completeness and certainty of the settlement data used. I think it is necessary to clearly indicate (and model) which parts of the region that are being studied here have reliable and complete archaeological settlement data, and data from which parts are limited in terms of certainty and coverage. Archaeology in Hungary is not my area of expertise but it is hard to imagine that there is a very accurate picture when it comes to the location of all the Neolithic sites in the country. I would expect some areas to be better studied than others, but the author does not seem to take this type of bias into account. There is a section in the article that discusses modern land-use and data bias. However, data certainty and coverage issues will not be limited to modern land-use. They will also be heavily influenced by resources available and restrictions in place to carry out archaeological survey and excavations, and data recording which I assume will not be homogenous for the region being studied by the article.

The methodology of the research is generally well-explained and the analytical techniques are performed to a high standard accompanied by high quality images. However, I would like to list the following issues to ensure a clearer presentation of the methodology.

- The formulas in the article are not well-presented in the sense that the article does not explain what coefficients and variables different letters stand for in the formulas (e.g. Ripley’s inhomogeneous K-function on lines 169-171; G-function on lines 183-184). The author refers to the original bibliographical source for these formulas and may be relying on these sources for the full explanation of the formulas. That is fine but it would be useful then to give the exact page numbers for the formulas in the original resources for the readers’ to easily check.

- The explanation of creating continuous soil data on lines 233-241 should be clarified by adding a few more sentences describing the procedure.

- The objectives and process of predictive modelling referred to in between lines 334 and 342 need to be better explained.

Some additional minor remarks:

- On line 64 “tight” should be “tied”.

- It would have been better I think if the “Soil Preferences” section starting on line 399 and ending on line 419 was presented at the beginning of the article in the context of the “Environmental Settings” section (starting on line 96).

- Shifting soil preferences during the Neolithic period are well-explained in the Conclusion section but the results of hydrological and topographical site location preferences are not touched upon. This is an unexpected omission that I believe should be corrected.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Piraye Hacıgüzeller

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Take a seed! Revealing Neolithic landscape and agricultural development in the Carpathian Basin through multivariate statistics and environmental modelling

PONE-D-21-14576R1

Dear Dr. Kempf,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Radu Iovita

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Thank you for taking the reviewers' questions seriously and implementing their suggestions into the manuscript. One last request is to provide the quantities referred to in the equations on pages 10 and 14 of the manuscript. It is true that those are reviewed in Nakoinz and Knitter's book, but it's not clear what each variable refers to and readers should not have to reach over to that book for understanding the quantities.

Reviewers' comments: