Practice question · Multiple choice
A site yields no pollen at all but abundant phytoliths. Why does that pattern report the burial conditions before it reports the vegetation?
Hints
- Ask what each proxy is physically made of.
- Absence of evidence is a claim about preservation before it is a claim about the past.
Show the answer
C. Because pollen is organic and phytoliths are silica
Why
Two proxies with different chemistries fail under different conditions. When one vanishes and the other does not, what is learned first is about preservation, not about the past landscape.
Practise Environmental Archaeology
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Environmental Archaeology
- Order the layers of a bog pollen core from oldest to most recent.
- Match each proxy to the material it is recovered from.
- What is "taphonomy" and why does it matter for animal-bone assemblages?
- A pollen core is sampled every centimeter, and peat here accumulates about 1 mm per year. Roughly how many…
- Sort each clue: does it come from plant proxies or animal proxies?
- Two plants that grew side by side can appear in wildly different proportions in a pollen core.
- A herd's kill-off pattern — most males slaughtered young, females kept for years — is read as dairying rather…