Oswald Heer and the Seeds the Swiss Lake Dwellings Kept

Archaeobotany identifies and quantifies the plant remains an excavation recovers, seeds, charred grain, pollen grains, wood charcoal and impressions left in fired clay, and uses that material to reconstruct what a community grew, gathered, stored, traded or burned. The discipline's founding case is the Swiss botanist Oswald Heer's study of waterlogged plant remains from the Neolithic and Bronze Age lake dwelling sites uncovered after the unusually low water levels of the winter of 1853 to 1854. Heer catalogued the preserved seeds and identified cultivated cereals, flax and fruit alongside gathered wild plants, publishing his findings from 1865 and giving archaeology for the first time a systematic method for reading plant evidence rather than treating it as incidental debris.

The atlas draws on archaeobotany wherever a sacred site's own material record is asked to speak to ritual use. Carbonized grain in a temple deposit, cultivated versus wild seed ratios at a shrine, or pollen sequences from a sacred grove are the kind of evidence that can support or undercut a claimed offering practice independently of what any later text says was offered. Archaeobotanical reports are accordingly treated as primary evidence for practice, distinct from and sometimes in tension with scriptural description of the same rite.