PONE-D-22-00644Settlement, environment, and climate change in SW Anatolia: dynamics of regional variation and the end of AntiquityPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Jacobson,

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the two reviewers appreciated your approach, results and interpretation, but one of them suggest several major to moderate revisions to improve the general clarity of your manuscript. I agree with this comments and I suggest you to consider them when revising your manuscript. Especially, take care of comments on the interpretation of climatic data.

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Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

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 paper “Settlement, environment, and climate change in SW Anatolia: dynamics of regional variation and the end of Antiquity” by Matthew et al. has the merit of making a large synthesis from different sources of data in a large area. The topic is consistent with the aims of PLOS ONE.

The paper, illustrating a possible link between climatic variations and change in settlements distribution in south-western Anatolia, is well written and provide a wide archaeological dataset. The analyses are well done.

In this kind of work, it is necessary to make some simplifications / assumptions that the authors rightly point out in the paragraph "Data critique".

I really appreciated this paper and I think that it is capable of improving knowledge on a key topic for this reason I think it is worth of publication in PLOS ONE after moderate revisions.

Main concerns:

I suggest to change a little bit the introduction (see the pdf). Specifically, the last part of introduction seems more a conclusion than the presentation of the focus of the paper.

In methods section, Authors should indicate the typology of satellite images and software GIS used.

In the last part of the discussion the Authors introduce non-climatic reasons for the change in the settlements distribution.

In my opinion these data need more references throughout the text.

Moreover, being a crucial and delicate point, I suggest improving the discussion on this aspect. In my opinion, in order to make clearly visible possible correlations, it could be very useful a dedicate figure on main non-climatic factors (e.g. socio-political reasons, seismicity, pandemics episodes, etc.) or the insertion of these data in figure 6 with climatic data, settlements and chronology. I really think this part could improve the paper, that I find interesting.

Figure 6 is one of the most important of the paper, but I don't understand the split in three parts and, in any case, in order to improve the readability, I suggest to use the same scale for x axis in the three figures.

In addition, I think that the paper might be a little shortened.

Minor concerns:

It seems to me that there are some mistakes in the ref to number of tables in the text. Please explain better table1 and add the years corresponding to each period in table 2 in order to make the paper more readable for non-archaeologists (I recognize that they are reported in the text, but I think could improve the understand of the paper put the years also in table).

The caption of figure 2 have to be improved (also including some description currently reported in caption of figure 3 –e.g. the meaning of typology of settlements).

About Figures:

Figure 2 please, improve the caption adding the explanation of terminology used in 2a and also explaining better the figure 2b

Figure 3 Is a good figure but due to the scale the symbols are not readable. I suggest changing the colour of “New restored architecture” too similar to “Material culture” and the colour of “Architectural Contraction” too similar to “Textual reference”.

Figure 4e I suggest increasing the thickness of the orange line

Figure 6 It is one of the most important of the paper, please see what I suggest above.

Reviewer #2: The present paper discusses the (often complex) correlation between environmental fluctuations and change in settlement structures. It focuses primarily on Southern Anatolia during the Roman and post-Roman periods. The article builds upon a very strong methodology and it makes use of a robust and solid set of data. I agree with the author(s) over the difficulty in exclusively related phenomena of contraction/expansion of settlements and climatic variations. Given the multi-faceted aspect of several paleo-climatic proxies, imputing solely to the natural factor dynamics of urbanization, ruralization, and land exploitation might be too much deterministic, in my view. And yet, the approach taken by the authors does not simply dismiss the environmental cause, but rather they frame it alongside with societal, political, and (very much appreciated) technological transformations. All these causes contribute to read the Southern Anatolian landscape transformation in a fuller and more comprehensible way.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Monica Bini

Reviewer #2: Yes: Rocco Palermo

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Submitted filename: PONE-D-22-00644_reviewer (1).pdf

Settlement, environment, and climate change in southwest Anatolia: Dynamics of regional variation and the end of Antiquity

PONE-D-22-00644R1

Dear Dr. Jacobson,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Andrea Zerboni, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The reviewers appreciated your manuscript and they suggest for immediate acceptance. I agree with them and I think your piece will be very important for regional studies and may represent a good example of geoarchaeological investigation on settlement distribution based on a multi proxy approach.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. 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

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

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

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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6. 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: Most of the required changes have been correctly addressed and, in my opinion, the manuscript has been adequately improved.

I think that the manuscript could be published in PLOS ONE

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Monica Bini

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