Vegetative Tissues from Mesolithic Sites in the Northern Netherlands

The potential of plant resources for the subsistence economies of early Holocene foraging groups in Northern Europe has long been the subject of scholarly interest. In the mid‐1970s both Paul Mellars (1976a) and David Clarke (1976) suggested that the edible biomass of temperate Europe was concentrated in resources such as nuts, roots, and tubers, which could have provided a substantial resource base. However, the lack of methodological tools to document the prehistoric use of these resources prevented a direct assessment of their significance (Mellars 1976a). This report presents the initial results of recent research on Mesolithic plant remains from the northern Netherlands which uses new techniques for the identification of fragmentary charred remains of vegetable tissues (Hather 1988, 1991, 1993) to document the range of utilized plant taxa from this important prehistoric period (Mason, Hather, and Hill‐man 1994). It demonstrates the significance of archaeo‐botanical analyses for any anthropological understanding of ancient foragers and provides a starting point for discussions of the ecology of immediately preagrarian societies on this continent.