Within the framework of a regional research project on wetlands as cultural heritage sites, an attempt was made to examine the natural and anthropogenic causes driving the vegetation dynamics and exploitation of a small mountain wetland. To assess its potential use as an archive of the landscape history, an environmental archaeology approach was used: palaeoenvironmental data from traditional pollen sampling by coring were matched with stratigraphic information from an excavation area of several square metres, and plant micro-and macroremain analyses (e.g. pollen assemblages, micro-and macrocharcoal, morphological and dendrochronological features of waterlogged tree trunks) were compared in order to evaluate them as effects of different environmental factors and to pinpoint these factors. In this paper, the focus is set mainly on the results originating from pollen analyses of a core drilled in the peat-bog, a few metres from the stratigraphic excavation. The start of peat deposition, sometimes coinciding with human activity, was dated around 10,000 cal. BP. The impact on the vegetation surrounding the site is clearly recorded in the pollen assemblages only from the Roman period (2010-1820 cal. BP) even though a long history of human presence is archaeologically documented in the area since the Palaeolithic. Since that time, the abrupt decline of fir favoured the final spread of beech which, in turn, in the Middle Ages (1180-790 cal. BP) leaves space to grassland exploitable for pasture and for agro-silvi-pastoral activities. This site has proven to be of great importance for the Holocene history of the silver fir.

Abstract. The Eurasian (née European) Modern Pollen Database (EMPD) was established in 2013 to provide a public database of high-quality modern pollen surface samples to help support studies of past climate, land cover, and land use using fossil pollen. The EMPD is part of, and complementary to, the European Pollen Database (EPD) which contains data on fossil pollen found in Late Quaternary sedimentary archives throughout the Eurasian region. The EPD is in turn part of the rapidly growing Neotoma database, which is now the primary home for global palaeoecological data. This paper describes version 2 of the EMPD in which the number of samples held in the database has been increased by 60 % from 4826 to 8134. Much of the improvement in data coverage has come from northern Asia, and the database has consequently been renamed the Eurasian Modern Pollen Database to reflect this geographical enlargement. The EMPD can be viewed online using a dedicated map-based viewer at https://empd2.github.io and downloaded in a variety of file formats at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.909130 (Chevalier et al., 2019).

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