Bremen students attend intensive botany course at NIhK

As part of their Master's programme in Environmental History at the University of Bremen, students took a block course in Archaeobotany at the NIhK, that was organised by Prof. Dr. Felix Bittmann. After an introduction to the morphology of the most important Central European cereal species, they identified charred cereal grains of various origins. This was followed by laboratory work – sieving soil samples to extract waterlogged botanical remains, which were then picked out and identified. The species found were recorded using the ArboDat data collection programme and exported as a table, sorted by ecological groups. This enables to reconstruct the former vegetation in the immediate vicinity of the sampling site and to testify the crops grown. Finally, the students practised identifying the wood species of subfossil wood fragments.