By Amy Weiss
Sep 26 2019
Humans alter the environments where they live and we can use those signals to give us clues about the past. We might not have a written record, but plants can give us a glimpse into how people have traveled, settled, or used their environment. Here are three examples.
1—Periwinkle (Vinca minor, seen above), an evergreen dwarf shrub, was cultivated as early as Roman times for its beautiful flower and use in the traditions of many countries. Some of the plants found in Europe today correlate with archaeological sites dating from Roman times, suggesting that these populations could be old cultural relics (Kowarik, 2005). In North America, periwinkle was commonly planted in cemeteries as a ground cover. Naturalized periwinkle populations can help us locate family cemeteries and graves whose markers have disappeared (Hobbs, 2012).
2—A study by Levis et al. (2017) found that even five centuries after the demographic collapse of Amerindian populations, domesticated plants persist in the forests of the Amazon, frequently associated with known archaeological sites. Woody domesticated species are five times more likely to be dominant in modern forests and were often dispersed from the site where they were domesticated to other locations in the Amazon where pre-Columbian people lived (Levis et al., 2017). Detecting the effect of societies in modern forests not only strengthens efforts to conserve useful wild-plant populations, but also refutes ideas of Amazonian forests being untouched by people. Domestication shapes Amazonian forests (Levis et al., 2017).
3—The Maya practiced intensive management and selection on plant species in Central America through their “forest gardens”—tree dominated home gardens filled with plant species used for daily life (Ross & Rangel, 2011). Even after a millennium of abandonment, species compositions in the forests with a high density of historic Mayan settlements are significantly different than sites lightly settled (Ross & Rangel, 2011). The densely-settled sites have a higher abundance of economically important tree species commonly used by the Maya in forest gardens; such as Attalea cohune used for thatch, fruit, and oil-rich seeds. People continue to shape forests, even after they are gone.
