Decoding Ancient Vegetation and Environment Using Potsherd Palynology: A Case Study from an Archaeological Site of Deltaic West Bengal, India

Archaeobotany deals with the interpretation of preserved plant remains from the archaeological sites in order to reconstruct the past vegetation and climate change and past human-plant relationship. The archaeobotanical remains found in the archaeological sites are classified into two groups; macro and microbotanical remains. Usually, the microbotanical investigations includes the extraction of spores/pollen, phytoliths, diatoms, fungal spores and starch grains from the soils/sediments of the archaeological sites. But sometimes archaeological artefacts including potsherds may also provide us with valuable information. Palaeobotanical investigations and palaeoclimate reconstruction from the archaeological potsherds are rare especially from the coastal regions of the globe. In the present study two earthen vessels associated potsherds collected from the Tilpi region of Sundarbans, deltaic West Bengal were studied in a multi-proxy approach. The age of the earthen pots and potsherds found to be 2630 ± 25 years BP. The pollen, phytolith and non-pollen palynomorph data of the potsherds revealed that a non-littoral forest was present in the area under tropical warm and humid climate condition. However, occurrence of pollen grains and phytoliths of palms, and Concentricystes sp. indicate that the coast line was not far away from the area of deposition (Rao 1990, Ramanujam et al. 1998).