The Role of Palynology in Archaeoecological Research: Reconstructing Human-Environment Interactions during Neolithic in the Western Mediterranean

Jordi Revelles

doi:10.3390/app11094073

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the potential of palynology within palaeoenvironmental research to reconstruct past landscapes and assess the relationship between vegetation and the first farming communities. The analysis of pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs in natural records evidenced how the adoption of farming and new sedentary settlement patterns resulted in major landscape transformation on extra-local or regional scales in the Western Mediterranean, affecting sclerophyllous and riparian forests in North Corsica, Mediterranean maquis in South Corsica, and oak forests in NE Iberia. In addition, palynology has been confirmed as a relevant source of data to address the local palaeoenvironmental evolution in lakes, wetlands, and archaeological sites, providing evidence of the presence of flocks (spores of coprophilous fungi), and changes in hydrology (salinity, dryness/wetness, aquatic/palustrine phases) and in geomorphology (soil erosion indicators). Finally, the spatial analysis of pollen and NPP intra-site distribution is presented here as a valuable tool to assess the social use of space in archaeological sites. In that sense, archaeopalynology has provided detailed information about site formation processes, social use of space, and the use of plants and fungi in the site of La Draga (Girona, Spain).

Highlights

The adoption of the farming lifestyle changed the way in which humans and nature interacted, resulting in the onset of an expanding process of landscape transformation [1,2]
This paper presents an overview on the potential of palynology within archaeoecological research to assess human-environment interactions and reconstruct past landscapes
The analysis of pollen and non-pollen palynomorphs in natural records was able to detect landscape transformation by Neolithic communities in the Western Mediterranean, in Corsica and NE Iberia, providing proof of major land-cover changes induced by the first farmers, affecting sclerophyllous and riparian forests in North Corsica, Mediterranean maquis in South Corsica and oak forests in NE Iberia

Summary

Introduction

The adoption of the farming lifestyle changed the way in which humans and nature interacted, resulting in the onset of an expanding process of landscape transformation [1,2]. The emergence of farming activities resulted in the transformation of landscapes, as recorded in pollen [7,8,9,10,11,12,13] and bioarchaeological records [14,15,16,17] in the Mediterranean area. The Mediterranean region is in the focal point of current challenges concerning global warming, sea-level rise and other natural processes such as wildfires, and in this context, long-term archaeological and palaeoecological data provide a reference period against which current conditions are compared in order to understand the dynamics linking climate, vegetation, fire, and human activities [18]. In different regions of the Mediterranean basin, a gap in archaeological evidence exists in the transition from the 9th to the 8th millennium cal BP [22]

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