Gerald K. Kelso

Pollen analysis and urban land use: The environs of Scottow’s Dock in 17th, 18th, and early 19th century Boston

Pollen analysis cannot be used to reconstruct the natural environment during the historical period in New England because Euroamerican land clearance and soil disturbance have biased the record. Land use is recorded among arboreal pollen counts, but the size of the affected pollen source area is difficult to ascertain. Close agreement among documentary, archaeological, and non-arboreal pollen records of land use within specific 17th through 19th century urban matrices and the contrasts between the pollen data from the contemporaneous, adjacent but functionally different Wilkinson Backlot and Bostonian Hotel Sites in Boston, Massachusetts, indicate that non-arboreal pollen spectra sensitively record vegetative response to different kinds of human activities across small horizontal and stratigraphic intervals. The minor pollen types are the most important; hence large sums must be tabulated if patterns of change are to be recognized. Pollen corrosion and concentration measures and arboreal/ non-arboreal pollen ratios contribute to the understanding of matrix deposition processes.

Pollen-record formation processes, interdisciplinary archaeology, and land use by mill workers and managers: The Boott Mills Corporation, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1836–1942

The pollen content of a soil profile is altered by natural processes that destroy pollen and move it downward in the profile. This downward movement separates older pollen from younger in slowly accumulating profiles and produces a spectrum with larger concentrations of pollen at the top of the profile and more pollen that appears degraded at the bottom. Archaeological site formation processes may be evaluated by comparison with this natural spectrum. When this pattern appears in an archaeological profile, cultural deposition has been slow. In places where there was more human activity, soil compression and faster sediment deposition preclude pollen percolation. These soil compression and fast sedimentation processes produce pollen concentrations that correlate with shifts in pollen types and reflect the relative density of vegetation. Reversals of the natural pollen concentration and degradation patterns and pollen concentrations shifting abruptly without clear stratigraphic boundaries in the soil reflect buried and exposed episodic fills and soil disturbance of several kinds. These pollen-record formation processes are used to define the nature and intensity of residential land use by mill workers and mill managers in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts.

Differential Pollen Preservation in a Seventeenth-Century Refuse Pit, Jamestown Island, Virginia

Pollen that falls on soil surfaces is moved down through the deposit by percolating groundwater. As it moves, the pollen is progressively destroyed by oxygen in the groundwater and by aerobic fungi. In the Chesapeake Bay region, the deepest pollen in unsheltered archaeological site profiles is about 100 years old. A comparative study of a stratigraphic pollen profile exposed to the elements at the surface and a series of pollen samples sheltered by artifacts was conducted with materials from a 17th-century refuse pit at Jamestown, Virginia. Pollen was recovered both from under rocks and artifacts lying flat or concave side down and from around iron objects. The shallowest pollen spectrum recovered from under an artifact was 25 cm below the deepest pollen preserved in the exposed stratigraphic profile. No pollen was found in unsheltered pollen samples at the same depths as the artifacts. The distributions demonstrate that the pollen associated with the 17th-century artifacts is contemporaneous with those artifacts; it did not percolate down from later deposits. The artifact pollen spectra were arranged by depth into an artificial profile and appear to record a series of edaphic changes in the pit and a landclearance episode in the Jamestown area.

Pollen analysis of the feature 4 privy at the Cross Street Back Lot Site, Boston, Massachusetts

The four nightsoil and three episodic fill deposits in the Cross Street site Feature 4 privy vault contained the highest percentages of Eurasian cereal grain-type pollen—wheat (Triticum), barley (Hordeum), oats (Avena), and/or rye (Secale)—reported in any historical archaeological site to date. Comparative pollen data from 8 historical nightsoil deposits, 17 historical house lot and feature profiles, 4 historical commercial/mercantile sites, and 8 profiles from agriculture-associated sites suggest that the Eurasian cereal-type pollen in the Feature 4 privy reflects spoiled flour disposed of in the vault rather than abnormally large quantities of grain products in the diet of the persons utilizing the privy.

Locating the Pre-Clearance Forest Border at Fort Necessity, Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, Using Pollen Analysis

The forest border position was critical in the brief 1754 siege of George Washington’s Fort Necessity at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania. Pollen analysis of core transects across the meadow and up the adjacent hillsides provided evidence of the location of the pre-clearance forest border to within a 20 ft. interval on seven of eight core transects and within 40 ft. on the eighth. This could not have been accomplished with the lake and bog palynology characteristic of palaeoecological palynology. Reconstruction of the historical period vegetation of specific plots requires investigation of the soil-pollen spectra of the target location itself. Pollen percolates downward in soil profiles, allowing the analyst to recognize the pollen spectra of the target time period, and published empirical studies of horizontal predeposition pollen transport assist the investigator in defining vegetation changes across space.