Spatially-explicit land cover land use change (LCLUC) models are becoming increasingly useful tools for historians and archaeologists. Such kinds of models have been developed and used by geographers, ecologists and land managers over the last few decades to carry out prospective scenarios. In this paper, we review historical models to compare them with prospective models, with the assumption that the ample experience gained in the development of models of prospective simulation can benefit the development of models having as their objective the simulation of changes that happened in the past. The review is divided into three sections: in the first section, we explain the functioning of contemporary LCLUC models; in the second section, we analyze historical LCLUC models; in the third section, we compare the former two types of models, and finally, we discuss the contributions to historical LCLUC models of contemporary LCLUC models.