| Abstract: |
Palaeoecology is the study of the ecologies of the past and is increasingly used by archaeologists as a means of reconstructing the former environments. It is one of a range of techniques comprising environmental archaeology. Others include the study of fossil soils. The examination of fossil bone material had an early origin in Southeast Asia with the work of Dubois published in 1894 first on dog bones (Barnes 1996), then on hominid bones, from the caves of central Java. Palaeoecological techniques have thus been used to trace human and animal evolution. Animal remains were also used to reconstruct the kind of vegetation environments in which hominids lived and evolved. So too were macrofossil remains of plants, principally leaves. Later (Polak 1933) came the examination of microfossils, initially of pollen, as well as the readily visable plant fossils embedded in peat bogs. Pollen is the male reproductive part of the flowering plants and ranges in size from less than 5 microns to over 200 (a micron is a thousanth of a millimetre).
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