Please accept my apologies for the delay in handling the response to the reviewer comments. I have now had a chance to review the original paper again, the reviewer comments, and the responses.

Both reviewers had substantive comments on the manuscript. One suggested that manuscript could be accepted with minor revisions, the other suggested that major revisions would be necessary.

The author responses address many of the reviewer comments and I understand that additional analysis has been undertaken as well. I therefore think that submission of a revised manuscript is appropriate. I anticipate being able to make a decision about the revised paper without sending it out for review, although the final judgment on that score will depend on the nature of the revisions.

That said, I think there are some fundamental issues raised by the reviewers that this revision needs to address, as follows:

1) The addition of coherence analysis is welcome but it seems incomplete. In the response you write: “MTM coherency analysis of the charcoal and 14C production rate data suggests several significant periodicities, with one centred on 289 years at the 99% significance level (Figure 5).” What about phase, which I think Joel Pedro asked about? Is the phase relationship between the charcoal and 14C data consistent with the interpretation presented in the paper? Also, coherency analysis normally identifies frequencies where there is coherence, rather than periodicities (here I am just commenting on the language used in the response). I suggest a few things here to make all of this clearer. First, I suggest you to plot the 14C record with the charcoal record as a function of time so the reader can see the raw data. Second, I suggest a standard cross-spectral plot that shows phase and coherence, with the x axis the same for all plots (as an aside, the labeling of periods on the plot provided with the responses was hard to interpret), with an interpretation of both with respect to the hypotheses presented. Alternatively at some other quantification of phase is needed. Third, I did you investigate the influence of age model errors, which you quantify to a certain extent, on the significance of the spectral and cross spectral analysis?
2) The paper relies on the inference that changes in charcoal concentrations are related to westerly wind strength, not location of the westerlies or some other variable, for example scavenging of the charcoal along the transport path. I would like to see additional justification of this fundamental inference and some additional discussion of charcoal transport.
3) The anonymous reviewer pointed out that accumulation rates vary bit in the studied section and also questioned why flux was not used in the analysis instead of concentration. The response was that concentration is more conservative, but it seems to me that the implications of the changing sedimentation rate should be considered? How much of the concentration variation could be explained due to such changes?

In addition, I have made some comments on specific issues in the text of the original paper, and that is attached here. Most of these are small points, or echoed in the above comments, but I hope they are helpful.

As we have discussed, I feel that the issue of coherency between your data and solar activity proxies could be better quantified. Joel Pedro mentioned this specifically - he was looking for an analysis of phase and coherence between the charcoal data and the solar activity proxies.

As we have discussed off line there is some analysis that you can do to quantify the relationships and I look forward to seeing that in a revision.

Thank you for considering how to make the discussion of coherence clearer and more complete. I am happy to accept the paper for publication now.
With very best wishes, and apologies for the drawn out decision making!
Ed Brook



PS I noticed two small typo-type errors that could be corrected:

Line 214-216:
The vast
214 majority of the charcoal fragments <50 μm, comparable in size to exotic
215 Nothofagus (20-40μm) and Podocarpus (40-50μm in diameter) pollen (Wang et
216 al., 2000; Wilson and Owens, 1999).

Is there a word missing in this sentence?

Line 223. Extra full stop.