A major area of palaeoenvironmental research is the reconstruction of past vegetation, climate, and human land usage from microfossil plant remains (those that cannot be seen with the naked eye) found in the sedimentary records of lakes and swamps. Increasingly, terrestrial soils - those found directly underneath extant, dryland vegetation - are also being used for this purpose. My own involvement in the environmental sciences focuses on these types of environmental reconstructions. These kinds of studies are carried out by scientists who are generically called palaeoecologists. Analyses have long been carried out in every region of the world and there is a voluminous literature. Increasingly, archaeologists are learning during their graduate careers or later how to carry out palaeoecological field and laboratory work, and this combined with numerous interdisciplinary collaborations has injected a strong archaeological component into research goals and interpretations of the assembled data.
Because vegetational zones vary greatly along latitudinal and elevational gradients and each region has its own set of naturally occurring plant species, the actual varieties of fossil plants retrieved and studied vary markedly from place to place. However, because the vegetation of any region is a direct correlate of the prevailing climate, trends in precipitation and temperature through time can often be inferred from the reconstructed vegetation, no matter what the type. Humans can exert very large impacts on landscapes independent of climate and, therefore, a major pursuit of palaeoecologists is documenting past landscape changes caused by prehistoric agriculture and other activities that extracted resources from the environment. Such endeavors are possible because plant succession after human interference is often different from that associated with natural kinds of landscape disturbances (e. g., tree blowdowns and floods; see below). There is a huge literature documenting a human presence on, and disturbance of, past landscapes, and there are few archaeologists who do not recognize the importance of environmental reconstructions and effectively assimilate and use palaeo-ecological data in their own research.
In summary, the major questions asked of these types of retrospective analyses vary little regardless of the world region under study. They include: (1) what was the prevailing climate and vegetation of the area during the time period during which sediments accumulated at the site, (2) have significant changes in vegetation and climate occurred and if so, what were the causes, (3) where a human presence has been documented near the study site, what were the ecological contexts of human occupation and what were the relationships between human settlement/subsistence strategies and the reconstructed environment through time, and (4) can human alteration of vegetation be detected; if so, when did it occur and what kinds of cultural practices was it associated with?
World History
