The Value and Limitations of Palynological Interpretations

Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for American Archeology, 1958. Discusses assumptions and problems of: techniques for extracting and identifying pollen, pollen distributions and deposition, analysis and statistics. Concludes that pollen study alone is not too reliable a methodology for establishing the types or durations of prior climatic events but it is reliable for reconstructing their geographic distributions and hypotheses of the reasons for climatic change.

本论文发表于1958年美国考古学会（Society for American Archaeology）年会。本文探讨了以下研究方向的前提假设与现存难题：花粉提取与鉴定技术、花粉分布与沉积规律、花粉分析及统计学方法。研究结论表明：仅依靠花粉研究，在确定既往气候事件的类型与持续时长方面可靠性有限，但该方法在重建气候事件的地理分布，以及提出气候变化成因假说时具备较高可信度。