First palynological results from the archaeological site of Sopot , Croatia

The arrival of food-producing economies in the Neolithic started the transformation of the natural landscape into the cultural landscapes we see today (LECHTERBECK et al., 2014). The study of past human activities and their environmental effect is high on the agenda of global change research. A record of pollen assemblages is one of the most common proxies employed for detecting the impact of human activities on the landscape. However, it is often difficult to detect and quantify human activities contained in palaeorecords due to their uncertainty and complexity. Since the 1980s, with the publication of several influential monographs by DIMBLEBY (1985), BEHRE (1986) and BIRKS et al. (1988), there has been increasing interest in the pollen records related to human activities. Though pollen is universally considered one of the best tools for environmental reconstructions and high resolution climatic inferences (e.g. FAEGRI & IVERSEN, 1989; ROBERTS et al., 2011, MERCURI et al., 2012), the palynology of archaeological sites has peculiarities which could make plant landscape reconstructions difficult to obtain. Human disturbance, poor pollen preservation and consequent low pollen concentrations are the most common reasons for the difficulties encountered when dealing with environmental reconstructions in archaeological contexts (DIMBLEBY, 1985; HOROWITZ, 1992).