Abstract
Modern pollen spectra are an invaluable reference tool for paleoenvironmental and cultural landscape reconstructions, but the importance of knowing the pollen rain released from orchards remains underexplored. In particular, the role of cultivated trees is in past and current agrarian landscapes has not been fully investigated. Here, we present a pollen analysis of 70 surface soil samples taken from 12 olive groves in Basilicata and Tuscany, two regions of Italy that exemplify this cultivation in the Mediterranean basin. This study was carried out to assess the representativeness of Olea pollen in modern cultivations. Although many variables can influence the amount of pollen observed in soils, it was clear that most of the pollen was deposited below the trees in the olive groves. A rapid decline in the olive pollen percentages (c. 85% on average) was found when comparing samples taken from IN vs. OUT of each grove. The mean percentages of Olea pollen obtained from the archaeological sites close to the studied orchards suggest that olive groves were established far from the Roman farmhouses of Tuscany. Further south, in the core of the Mediterranean basin, the cultivation of Olea trees was likely situated approximately 500–1000 m from the rural sites in Basilicata, and dated from the Hellenistic to the Medieval period.
Highlights
The olive tree is an important marker of the Mediterranean cultural landscapes
The more extensive olive groves (B5 and T3; Figure 3) had lower values (IN: c. 51% in B5, and c. 23% in T3). This indicated that an evident relationship was lacking between the size and representativeness of Olea pollen taken from the center of an olive grove
Low percentages of Olea pollen may be interpreted as being the result of longdistance transport, while percentages of >2% may indicate the presence of plantations at least 1,000 m from the sampling point(s)
Summary
The olive tree is an important marker of the Mediterranean cultural landscapes. Molecular, archaeobotanical, and paleoenvironmental data are acknowledged as essential for reconstructing the history of the domesticated olive tree (Zohary and Hopf, 2000; Newton et al, 2014). The Representativeness of Olea Pollen (Roselli, 1979; Ribeiro et al, 2012; Messora et al, 2017) Another problem arises from the fact that O. europaea is an evergreen xerophilous tree, whose growth is promoted by a warming climate (Moriondo et al, 2013). Palynologists have concluded that Olea pollen may be considered both a proxy of warming and drought conditions, as well as the product of a fruit-bearing plant dispersed and cultivated by humans High percentages of this pollen recovered in the spectra from archeological sites, or from human-influenced off-sites, can reasonably result from a process of cultivation. It is not clear how much “high” may be the percentage of Olea pollen in modern agrarian landscapes. The amount of pollen that fell to the ground and was trapped in sediments below olive trees and near modern groves has not yet been systematically assessed
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