<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) focuses on the drilling of two deep ice cores, the first at Dome C and the second at Kohnen station (75°00’ S, 0°04’ E) in Dronning Maud Land (DML). This paper deals with stable-isotope records from ice cores drilled in DML. In the first season, the deep EPICA DML core reached a depth of 450 m, recovering ice approximately 7000 years old. Generally, the δ<jats:sup>18</jats:sup>O record indicates a stable Holocene climate and shows low variability. However, during the last 4000 years (based on a preliminary time-scale) the δ<jats:sup>18</jats:sup>O values decrease continuously by about 0.6%, and the deuterium excess values increase by about 0.5%. The correlation between δ<jats:sup>18</jats:sup>O and the deuterium excess <jats:italic>d</jats:italic> is investigated for a 50m long core section and the near-surface snow. High-pass filtered profiles are positively correlated, whereas the correlation between low-pass filtered profiles is negative. A post-depositional effect due to diffusion processes can be seen in a sub-annually resolved profile from snow-pit samples. Changes in the seasonality of the evolution of the snow cover and the consequences for stable-isotope content are demonstrated with data from ice core B31.</jats:p>