Pollen-Analytical Perspectives on the End of Roman Britain

ABSTRACT

Pollen analysis is increasingly being used to investigate the landscape context of the end of Roman Britain, and specifically the extent to which there was continuity or change in land use and farming practices. Approaches vary from the use of single off-site pollen sequences to the assessment of databases of large numbers of sites, but all are faced with the necessity of considering key interpretative issues such as pollen source areas and chronological precision. This paper presents an overview and critique of pollen-based approaches to the question of post-Roman landscape continuity and change, highlighting the need for caution in site selection, inter-site comparison, and in extrapolation to the landscape scale. Consideration is given to what is meant by continuity in palaeoenvironmental terms, based on ecological studies of vegetation responses to grazing exclusion and land abandonment. The implications of these studies for future approaches to detection of post-Roman landscape continuity and change in palaeoenvironmental sequences are discussed.