Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each clue: does it come from plant proxies or animal proxies?
Groups: Plant proxies · Animal proxies
- Cut-marks on cattle long bones
- Silica phytoliths from grass cells
- Sheep age-at-death profile
- Tooth-eruption stage fixing slaughter season
- Charred barley grains in a pit
- Pollen grains in a lakebed core
Hints
- Ask whether the evidence comes from plants or animals.
- Grains, pollen and phytoliths all come from one side.
Show the answer
Plant proxies: Pollen grains in a lakebed core, Silica phytoliths from grass cells, Charred barley grains in a pit
Animal proxies: Cut-marks on cattle long bones, Tooth-eruption stage fixing slaughter season, Sheep age-at-death profile
Why
Palynology and macrofossils read the flora; zooarchaeology reads the fauna. Together they reconstruct the whole living landscape around a site.
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 site yields no pollen at all but abundant phytoliths. Why does that pattern report the burial conditions…
- A pollen core is sampled every centimeter, and peat here accumulates about 1 mm per year. Roughly how many…
- 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…