*3.1. Historical Documents*

China possesses a remarkable continuous written history providing information on natural and anthropogenic environmental changes. Such information includes details of floods, droughts, agricultural activities, irrigation, river management, extreme climatic events, geography, territory, population, and economic activities which can be used in detailed reconstructions of river evolution [16,17]. The literature used in this research mainly comes from the *Twenty-Four Histories* (such as *Records of the Historian Wei Aristocratic Family*), *Local Chronicles* (such as *Xiangfu Gazetteer, Shunzhi or Guangxu edition*), *Local Literatures* (such as *Bian Wei Wet Record (Bianwei Shijin Lu)* and *Rumeng Record (Ru meng lu),* and contemporary literatures on Kaifeng Yellow River Research (such as *Annals of Kaifeng Yellow River and Kaifeng suburbs Yellow River*).

### *3.2. Archaeological Data*

Since the 1980s, the Kaifeng Cultural Relics Team and the Songcheng Archaeological Team have carried out a series of archaeological exploration works on the Kaifeng "city overlap city" site, and have made many important discoveries, most notably, the Song-Jin Palace and the Ming Prince Zhou's Mansion (Figure 2) were found below the Longting Lake in Kaifeng city [28]. Some of their results provided clues for the establishment of the chronological framework of each core sedimentary cycles for this study (Table 3).



**Figure 2.** Yin'an Dian archaeological Site of the Ming Prince Zhou's Mansion (Photographed in 1985).

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