Sediments of Bohemian Forest lakes are important natural archives. Their sedimentary record covers postglacial history of the lakes as well as history of natural processes in a wider region. It also documents local settlements and changes in landscape management. The lake sediments have attracted the interest of the scientific community since the end of the 19th century. Despite of the fact that modern paleolimnological and paleoecological investigations were already performed in the second half of the 20th century in the Bohemian Forest Mts., the great potential of the lake sediments was not fully utilized in scientific research so far. The ultimate objective of this thesis is to deepen knowledge of these natural archives and support their utilization in future studies. Several specific objectives have been set to achieve the ultimate objective: i) to compare age of the Bohemian Forest lake sediments with the recent knowledge of local deglaciation at the end of the last ice age, ii) to integrate chronostratigraphic marker horizons as one of the tools of Late Glacial sediment dating, iii) to assess the role of bioerosion in chitinous subfossil freshwater invertebrate remains on the record representativeness, and iv) to prove the presumed dystrophic nature of the lakes during the Holocene using...