Spring Has Sprung! What Plants Can Tell Us About the Past

 When you think of archaeology, plants may not be the most immediate thing that comes to mind, but occasionally, under the right conditions, plant remains are found at archaeological sites. Archaeology is full of sub-disciplines, which makes sense when you think about it. There is so much to learn about the past that no one archaeologist can possibly learn about or know it all. One of those sub-disciplines is archaeobotany.

 Archaeologists that study archaeobotany are interested in learning more about how people of the past interacted with plants. Think about what a huge role plants have in our modern life. The same, or similar, was true in the past as well. People ate plants, grew plants, use plant material to construct shelters and tools, and lived among various plants growing wild. Plant remains can also tell us about past environments, thus providing clues to what life was like for people in the past. 

Plant remains from the Lake Monroe Outlet Midden
(photo courtesy of the Florida Museum of  Natural 
History, University of Florida)

Plant remains are organic, fragile, and usually (but not always) small. They don't always preserve well at archaeological sites. It takes special environmental conditions for them to preserve and archaeologists have to take special care to recover these fragile remains on the occasions they are found at an archaeological site. Most of the time archaeologists only find a small sampling of the remains of the past. They only find the things that preserve well, such as stone and ceramics. But as we know, people are much more complex, and finding plant remains is a treat for archaeologists and a chance to gain a more thorough understanding of our past! Sometimes plant remains are small, like pollen (can you imagine!?), and other times they are large, like a dugout canoe. No matter their size, plant remains provide unique opportunities for archaeologists. 

Take a moment to look around you and make note of all the objects made from plants. Then think about how many of those objects would still be around 500 to 1,000 years from now. Probably not many. Now imagine someone in the future trying to piece together your daily life without having all those plant-based objects available to study. They probably would only be able to learn a fraction of what your daily life was like. That is why archaeobotany is so valuable to the study of the past. So this month, as plants are blooming and it is starting to feel like spring, we want to take a moment to talk about plants in an archaeological context. We hope you will join us on this journey. From learning how archaeologists recover plant remains to what they can tell us, it is sure to be enlightening!