Anthropology 1020E Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Paleobotany, Biofact (Archaeology), Scree
25 Nov 2016
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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Ecofacts,
Why do archaeologists keep a bunch of old bones and seeds?
Ecofacts
•Environmental reconstruction
•Diet and subsistence strategy
•Domestication: taking control of food production, changes that happen in both plants
and animals to pin point when and where it was happening
•Season of occupation: what time of year a site was occupied, inside how people were
moving around the landscape
•Social organization: difficult to reconstruct, not far from hopeless
•Ritual and beliefs
Ecofact Recovery
•How we pulls these things out of the ground
•They are small things and they are easy to miss
•Screening: ensures consistent recovery of animal remains
-Put dirt in a bucket and put it on a scree, different sizes of mesh, try not to miss
the small things by using a smaller mesh, but it will take a lot longer with smaller
mesh
-Pick through material remained after screening
•Flotation: ensures consistent recovery of plants
-Used a big container, and have water flowing through
-Plant parts will float in the surface, and get caught in the light fraction
-Heavier material will sink to the bottom, the heavy fraction
Plant Remains
•Palaeobotany studies plant remains
!1
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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
•Plant ecofacts
-Microfossils
•Pollen: airborne, widely distributed.
-Tells us about a broad area in terms of the wide, found everywhere.
-Preserves well, doesn’t matter what kind of conditions you have on a
site you will find pollen remains.
-Relatively easy to identify to family or genus
•Phytoliths: silica structures in cell walls, making them rigid and strong for
leaves to stand up
-Indestructible, can burn them, flood them, freeze them, etc. but they
can’t break down so they will be preserved for long periods of time
-Stay where they fall, don’t get picked up by the wind and get carried
around
-Identifiable only to broad categories, different portions of a plant have a
distinct phytoliths
-Macro-fossils: bigger plant remains that can be seen by the naked eye
•Seeds, charcoal
-Fragile
-Preserved through charring, wet deposits
Animal Remains
•Zoo-archaeology studies animal remains, dealing with hard tissue
-bones, teeth, antlers, shell, insects
-teeth preserve well, bc they are made with really hard structures
-bone preservation depends on environment, dry environments are friendly to
bone, environments that are wet and stay wet are good, permafrost is good
-Southern Ontario is not a good place for bone preservation
Identification
•Modern reference collection
How do archaeologists use ecofacts to reconstruct past environments?
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Tuesday, March 10, 2015
•“Frost Fair” London, England 1740 when the Thames river would freeze over but it
doesn't do that anymore
•Indicator species: we wouldn’t look out our window in London and think to see a polar
bear or a palm tree
•For us to rely on indicator species we have to assume: species lived in same
environmental conditions in the past that they do in the present
Pollen Analysis
•Regional scale environmental reconstruction
-Core sampling
-Getting a picture of variability at a regional scale
-Have a big long hollow metal tube that is put into the ground and when you take
out the dirt you are pulling up pollen
-Inside the tube there is strata, how can we say these strata relate to each other?
from lower down it will be earlier and up at the top will be more recent
-Then we would divide up the core into sections to give a relative chronology, and
then look at the types of pollen in each section
Pollen Diagram
•Tracks changes in relative abundance of species
•Date the strata that is extracted
•If we concentrate only on 2 species, there are a lot of different observable changes
•ex. Oak likes warm summers, and precipitation but Pine prefers cold and dry
conditions so there is abundance of Pine at the beginning and the Oak has a spike.
This is interesting bc the neanderthals disappear from this cave when the change
happened bc they are cold adapted, so when the weather changed the Neanderthals
left
Animals - indicator species
•Plants get leave their setting to a setting better to them bc they are rooted and place
and can’t move
!3
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Ecofact recovery: how we pulls these things out of the ground, they are small things and they are easy to miss, screening: ensures consistent recovery of animal remains. Put dirt in a bucket and put it on a scree, different sizes of mesh, try not to miss the small things by using a smaller mesh, but it will take a lot longer with smaller mesh. Pick through material remained after screening: flotation: ensures consistent recovery of plants. Used a big container, and have water owing through. Plant parts will oat in the surface, and get caught in the light fraction. Heavier material will sink to the bottom, the heavy fraction. Tells us about a broad area in terms of the wide, found everywhere. Preserves well, doesn"t matter what kind of conditions you have on a site you will nd pollen remains.
