With modern society paying increasing attention to environmental issues to address sustainability,archaeological data offer a promising source to support the study of ancient culturelandscape relationships from a macroscopic perspective.China,as a country with an extensive cultural tradition and diverse topographic environment,provides an ideal case to study cultural responses to climate change.Based on extensive published archaeological survey data for northern China,this work describes a GIS based spatial analysis aimed at understanding cultural responses to Holocene climate changes.These responses are studied from the joint perspectives of changes through time in archaeological site distributions and their interactions with the local topographic conditions.