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Peat and marsh sediments are in the Czech Republic, SIovakia and in neigh-bouring countries rcstrictcd to some, often smali scalę areas such as humid montane and submontane regions, lowland oxbow lakes or around some major resurgences of Artesian springs. There are the whole landscapes where due to the entirely different environmental conditions pollen analysis cannot be applied or where it yields only stratigraphically insignificant fragments of evidence (see maps in Firbas 1949 or Succow and Jeshke 1986). Howevereven in these regions we may found Holocene sedimentary seąuences reflecting temporal and paleoenvironmental changes that could be studied by different methods. The limnic and palustrine environments tend to be conservativeones and usually less sensitive to such aspects as humidity oscillations. The pollen analysis reflects pollen influx from larger areas. On the other hand rock screes, sandy sediments under sandstone rockshelters, tufa bodies, cave fills and other Holocene sediments may provide a complementary information about actual function of different landscapes or even habitats. We propose in this article a “holistic” approach towards understanding of Holocene environ-ments, where pollen analysis represents just one aspect in the whole arrayof possible approaches. We focus on problems as follows: (1) to identify the problems that can be solved by study of different Holocene facies, (2) to sum-marize the principal fmdings and (3) to compare these results with the pale-obotanical studies.

2. CONCEPT OF HOLOCENE STRATIGRAPHICAL PROYINCES

K.D. Jager (2000, pers. com.) proposed that the Holocene seąuences can be in some areas characterized by almost uniform sedimentational pattern while other areas are morę or less different ones. The Scandinavian stratig-raphy had become the base for intemational recognition and division of the Holocene, however the further to south we are going the bigger contrasts we may observe - e.g. in Palestine The Late Glacial represents the strikingly humid period while the climatic optimum of the Late Atlantic of the European di vision is there one of driest climatic phases (Niemi et al. 1997). The denom-ination “climatic optimum" has thus in Near East paradoxical meaning of an environmenta) crisis! But even in European temperate zonę we found sharp distinctions - in Western Europę where relatively humid and wami oceanie climate prevailed throughout the whole Holocene we observe a numberof rather short-lived climatic “ups and "downs" probably dependent on the fimc-tion of the North Atlantic Oscillation (Roberts 1998), while in Central Europę