Recent  

The Miaoli Tableland (northwestern Taiwan) consists of a sequence of fine-grained tidal to coarse fluvial late Quaternary sediments which underwent a spatially differentiated uplift and fluvial dissection. They reveal repeated rework processes of fluvial cobbles from the highlands to the coast. A new landform classification based on high-resolution 3D terrain analysis results in a new interpretation of the landform evolution. The results favour a local rarely used Quaternary stratigraphic code.

This is an appraisal of the article by Wolfgang Boenigk published in Eiszeitalter und Gegenwart in 1978.

Menke (1970) presented a clear overview of the state of the art of Pleistocene stratigraphy for Schleswig-Holstein. After 50 years, a reconsideration of the original paper is needed to check if statements are still valid. Four issues were selected and reconsidered in the light of research progress made in the past decades.

A year after his doctoral thesis, Ložek chose to share with the international community not only his vision but also the one that the Czechoslovakian researchers working on loess deposits had at that time, through a paper published in the well-established E&G journal. It represented a detailed and complete state of the art of loess and mollusc studies at that time, an extraordinarily synthetic review that still yields a modern flavor as many of the points made remain relevant today.

Flohn's publication discusses the state of knowledge of the Pleistocene climate from the perspective of atmospheric sciences, which in 1963 was mainly based on geological and geomorphological evidence. The paper discusses to what extent Flohn's conclusions are still valid and how new findings, methods, and ideas have added to our present-day picture of the Pleistocene climate.

This work is an invited retrospective to the seminal paper of Fink (1956). Fink combined field evidence from geology, geomorphology, and soil science to provide a holistic framework of Quaternary stratigraphy and paleoenvironmental evolution in the Austrian Alpine foreland. This paper is an outstanding example of the relevance of interdisciplinary perspectives to understand landscape evolution. With a few exceptions in detail, the findings of Fink remain largely valid until today.

Karl J. Narr's paper on the stratigraphy of Upper Palaeolithic artefact types and cultural groups from 1952 synthesized the state of research in the early 1950s. Narr's singular focus on cultural history is instructive in terms of both the history of research and as a reflection of what the goals of Palaeolithic archaeology could and should be today.

A main element in Büdel's concept is his quite provocative link between climate zones and geomorphological processes, a strong relation which was frequently contested later. Büdel's contribution is still relevant in modern times as the present-day climatic change will probably also invoke a poleward shift of climatic zones, accompanied by associated shifts in geomorphological environments and ecosystems.