An excavation of the Vesakoyakha II–IV and Nyamboyto I burial grounds was conducted during the 2014 field season, and soil samples from intact burials dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, were analyzed to determine interactions between parasites and host/vectors. Considering the discovery of Diphyllobothrium sp. and Taenia sp. eggs in soil samples from the pelvic region, diphyllobothriasis was the most frequent helminthic infection among the Taz Nenets. The Nyamboyto Nenets mainly consumed uncooked fish, while the Vesakoyakha Nenets had a bigger variety in food choices, including reindeer meat. Nenets children were given raw fish from early childhood. The paleoparasitological results corroborate rare ethnographic records about the consumption of uncooked reindeer cerebrum which led to beef tapeworm helminthiases. This is the first parasitological report of helminthic diseases among the Taz Nenets, and, as such, it provides insight into their subsistence activities and food patterns and broadens our understanding of their health condition.

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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