Reconstruction of a Czech Early Miocene vegetation

Abstract

Methods used by some archaeological botanists to analyse their data can be successfully applied to certain aspects of geobotany. Presence/absence geobotanical records can be studied by multivariate statistical methods to yield lists of ecologicallyassociated taxa. A simple, parametrical, quantitative description of the samples at the more abstract level of plant associations can then be made, using the representation in the original samples of the elements of these lists. When applied to the macrobotanical evidence from the North Bohemian Basin, the relationships between the associations confirmed the patterns that had been suspected previously. As large-scale climatic changes did not seem to influence the fossil record, it was possible to treat the samples as though they were contemporary. The spatial distributions of the associations could therefore be represented as contoured maps. These maps identify which associations were autochthonous, which ones were allochthonous, and whence the allochthonous fossils came and how far they may have travelled.