Practice question · True or false
Two plants that grew side by side can appear in wildly different proportions in a pollen core.
Hints
- Do all plants produce pollen equally?
- Wind-pollinated pine versus insect-pollinated lime.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Pine and birch are wind-pollinated and flood a core; lime and many insect-pollinated species are barely represented even when abundant. Pollen percentages measure production and dispersal, so they need correction factors before they say anything about the vegetation that stood there.
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…
- Sort each clue: does it come from plant proxies or animal proxies?
- A herd's kill-off pattern — most males slaughtered young, females kept for years — is read as dairying rather…