Recovering Ethnobotanical and Local Environmental Pollen Data from an Exposed Archaeological Site in Northeastern North America: Locus 2 at the Carns Site, Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts

Abstract

The pollen in the matrix of temperate-zone archaeological sites is moved downward by percolating groundwater and progressively destroyed by natural processes. This limits the age of the ethnobotanical and environmental pollen spectra in sites. Flat rocks, flat artifacts, and artifacts and shells found concave-site-down are commonly encountered in excavations and will shelter occupation-period pollen spectra. At Carns Site Locus 2, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, pollen grains recording the presence of agricultural products and probable gathered non-agricultural vegetation, as well as the season of construction of a feature and the placement of a rock, were recovered from under three of the four flat-bottomed objects tested. The data suggest that a systematic investigation of the pollen spectra from under a series of stratigraphically or chronologically organized flat-bottomed rocks and artifacts, backed by a comparative pollen profile, will yield ethnobotanical and environmental data not normally recovered from northeastern prehistoric archaeological sites.