This study examines the development of agropastoralism in the Marmara Lake Basin in western Anatolia. It investigates how the interrelationships between geomorphology, hydrology, climate, and vegetation in and around the lake basin might have influenced the distribution of this form of land use across the landscape. It employs a combination of spatially explicit GIS-based environmental models and qualitative models of pastoral land use derived from the ethnographic, historical, and archaeological records. These landscape models serve to maximize the heuristic potential of limited archaeological datasets. The results of such research are not explicit reconstructions of prehistoric land-use systems, but rather a series of testable hypotheses to guide future research. These models suggest that climatic stability during the Early Holocene would have favored wetland agriculture and localized sheep herding, and that a shift to a highly variable climate during the Middle Holocene might have been met with increased dryland farming and extensive goat herding.