The ongoing ecological conversion of mountain forests in the Erzgebirge conceptually also requires a historical perspective on the very long-term vegetation and land-use dynamics. We collected and evaluated 121 pollen diagrams. Pollen indications of a local prehistoric human impact also in the higher altitudes find archaeological parallels in the region. The pollen data show that immediately before the medieval clearing, forests were mainly dominated by beech and fir and complemented by spruce.

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.

We studied snails from Holocene river sediments of the upper Alazani River in the southeastern Caucasus. Since no natural floodplain forests existed in the river valley until ca. 4500 years ago, our snail data confirm a formerly suggested regional settlement center from the ca. 8000 years unknown thus far. Furthermore, increasing proportions of water-related snails for ca. 4000 years indicate a shift of the river course possibly linked with the formation of the Greater Caucasus.