Answer:
They’re critical! Botanists can give us all kinds of fascinating information about the things we recover. Say I am digging a site where some people lived 4,600 years ago. As part of our samples, we send out liter bags of dirt to different laboratories, including a botanist, who is able to identify micro and macro botanicals in the soil sample.
what kinds of things they can tell me depends on what’s in the sample: say there are charred grains, if they can identify them that might tell us what these people ate. Say there’s pollen on the site, and we recover same that’s clearly associated with the age of the human occupation. That can tell us what plants were growing at the site when it was occupied, and maybe even what season it was occupied.
This can be huge, because our present-day environments are not necessarily the same as they were 4,600 years ago. Say I was on a site in Wisconsin that’s covered in trees today, but we found a lot of botanicals related to prairie grasses- that can help us get a better idea of the environment in which people lived- in this case, help us to understand that at the time of deposition the site was in a prairie environment.
All of this, of course, has the ultimate goal of understanding not the paleoenvironment itself, but more importantly how humans were shaped by that environment and themselves shaped it.
Explanation:
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