Archaeological woody plant remains as indicators of human selection and environmental changes

Plant remains from archaeological contexts can provide interesting information on both past societies and environmental history. These biological remains constitute an important portion of our cultural heritage and an important palaeoenvironmental archive. Plant remains have often been neglected and considered as additional and redundant in many archaeological researches. In the last years the sensitivity of archaeologists to natural issues is thankfully increasing and is opening new perspectives in the knowledge of our past. The reconstruction of past environment in archaeological studies represents a fundamental issue and a challenge for bioarchaeologists. Although archaeobotany is a fairly recent addition to the study of the past, it now makes use of many techniques, also from other disciplines, which are far behind classical archaeobotany. Here we present three different approaches to the study of plant remains. A) The importance of using palynology to assess past environmental features is well known as well as its application to archaeological reconstructions for studying the onset and evolution of cultural landscapes. Carrying on parallel studies both on pollen and macroremains in archaeological contexts turns out very useful. B) An independent source of past climate reconstruction in archaeological contexts comes from the application of stable carbon isotopes to archaeological charcoals to provide long climate and environmental records. C) Other possibilities concerning the application of other disciplines to the study of plant remains have been explored, consisting in the DNA extraction from ancient woods (aDNA study) to test the genetic continuity between ancient and modern arboreal taxa taken from several archaeological sites.