Terrestrial gastropods are good indicators of environmental changes, and thus of the human impact. However, the problem of the temporal resolution of assemblages which results from the combination of the land snails response time to human disturbances and of taphonomic processes, has not been much studied. The response time of malacofauna to disturbances is examined here through two present-day examples (fires and post-cultural successions). The taphonomic processes are analysed form an experimentation in a small valley of Vaucluse, with a comparison between the well-known evolution of the landscape over one century and the land snail assemblages contained in the soil horizons. From the example of a Holocene site, we then try to analyse how the Holocene assemblages can be representative of different regimes of human disturbances.
