Book review article: European pollen maps

Abstract

Introduction For several years, Quatemary palynologists have looked forward to the publication of this book. In some 667 pages Brian Huntley and John Birks have presented data drawn from 843 locations ,across Europe. With the assistance of the computer the data have been hatched, mapped and despatched to us in an attractive format-the authors, publishers and all palynologists should be well pleased with An Atlas of Past and Present Pollen Maps for Europe: O-13 000 years ago. The Atlas is presented in hard covers with a matching folder for the overlay sheets, and the whole set is boxed. The least attractive part of the set is the price tab. At E85 it is clearly beyond the means of most academics, and even the most ardent palynologist would have to choose carefully between buying this volume and depriving the dog of its food for a year, or forgoing the Christmas turkey for the next decade. Hopefully enough libraries can still afford to allocate this sum to a single book. The principal aim of the book is to display the pollen data available for Europe (and including Iceland and Greenland) in a form which shows the spatial variation in the data. Isopoll maps (where contours represent the same pollen or spore percentage for a given taxon at one time) are drawn at a continental scale for the lateand postglacial periods, sometimes down to intervals of 500 radiocarbon years. The many individual taxon maps are supplemented by statistical analyses of the data (mainly principal components analysis-PCA) and a valuable commentary on each group of maps and the maps as a whole. The resulting evidence for plant migrations, refugia and floristic and vegetational reconstructions encourages the authors to propose various hypotheses to explain the patterns created from their extensive database. It is pointed out by the authors (p. 8) that the potential applications of this synthesis are not solely botanical but also involve large-scale environmental and cultural changes such as climate, soils and plant and animal domestication.