Pollen for Archaeologists
The past few weeks have been pollen themed. Teaching pollen for Environmental Archaeology, and a new paper out on pollen analysis (and geoarchaeology) at Radzyń Chełminski in Poland . The latter is from my time working on the Ecology of Crusading project , and is a nice case study in using multi-proxy approaches, including historical documentary sources, to investigate landscape change. Pollen analysis is not my area of research expertise, but I have spent a long time working with pollen data. As a geography undergraduate I had several pollen classes for modules in Quaternary Environments and Biogeography, and it also featured heavily in my MSc Geoarchaeology. Pollen analysis does what it says on the tin - we extract pollen grains from sequential layers in sediment cores, and count them to see how vegetation has changed over time. If we have a sediment layer dated to 1000 years ago that is full of oak pollen for example, we can reasonably assume that there was an oa...