What can paleoecology learn from anthropology?

Johanna Swanson

You can always find amazing things in the back of a museum. It could be bones, founding documents, or in this case, an old test tube of burnt wood which can help color the picture of what Iowa flora was 1500 years ago. In their paper, William Green and Kathryn Parker, Pre-Contact Use of Balsam Fir, show that some scraps of forgotten charcoal can provide novel information about the historic range of the balsam fir.

            During the 1920’s, archeological excavations occurred at Seeberger cave in Jackson County, Iowa. Archeologists and paleoecologists have plenty of experience identifying animal remains, however, it is less common to look at the remains of burned wood from human campsites. In fact, this is the first paper I have read that tries to identify the species of charcoal used in a hearth fire. This technique has implications for future paleoecology studies, as it means that trees that are less likely to be near lakes or don’t have wind born pollen have a chance to be identified as part of a fossil record. Using electron microscopy Green and Parker determined the wood to be from 300 AD and of the genus Albies, more commonly known as firs.

            What is bizarre is that there are no fir trees native to Jackson County in the present. Most fir trees are either in the north, the pacific coast, or mountain ranges, with one exception. Abies balsama has some small remnant populations that reside in northeast Iowa over a 100 km away in a habitat unique to the driftless area called algific talus slopes.

An image from Green and Parker’s paper showing the distance from Seeberger Cave to the nearest balsam firs.

A diagram from the Iowa Natural Heritage showing how algific talus slopes work.

            Algific talus slopes stay cool throughout the year thanks to air flowing through underground ice caves that escapes onto the hillside. As these hills stay colder throughout the year, lifeforms like the Iowa Pleistocene snail, northern monkshood, and balsam fir can survive much further south than they could into areas like Iowa and Illinois. While all remaining balsam firs live on talus slopes farther to the north, some talus slopes are within 20 kilometers of Seeberger Cave.

A diagram from Green and Parker’s paper showing talus slopes in/around Jackson County, with Seeberger Cave marked as a star.

            It would have been significantly easier to transfer and use balsam fir from less than 20 km away then hauling it over 100 km from a site in Northeast Iowa. The presence of balsam fir in this cave suggests that algific talus slopes serving as a paleorefugia much further south than previously imagined. Instead of already being transitioned into a prairie and oak savannah matrix, parts of Iowa held on to biotic systems that reflect a far older environment from the ice age.

Additionally, this article shows the importance of cross disciplinary work. This research suggesting that balsam fir populations existed further south than previously thought didn’t come from traditional paleontological techniques, but instead from anthropologists using archeological field techniques nearly a century ago. Archeologists have long known that human debris can hold valuable clues to a location’s history, and this has applications well beyond reconstructing humanity’s past. I hope that Green and Parker’s work encourages others to look at archeological samples as potential datapoints for measuring past floral and faunal populations.

            While Green and Parker’s conclusions about balsam fir populations are fascinating, there are some major flaws in their theory that I would be remiss to ignore. There are three hypotheses for how this wood got into Seeberger cave.

1) The wood was transported in from much further north like Minnesota or further east or west.

2) The wood was transported in from talus slopes in Northeastern Iowa.

3) The wood was transported in from a nearby slope.

            I agree that the wood likely isn’t from far away, but I do have some doubts over whether it could be from Northeastern Iowa. Native Americans had complicated and sophisticated trading networks all over North America, and for items of ritual importance like balsam fir (which the article suggests is being used for religious purposes at Seeberger Cave) there could be economic reasons to justify transporting it long distances. Additionally, as Chief Iowa Archeologist John Doershuk once put it; “It isn’t that big of a deal for native people to just walk to a site for a couple of weeks to get something they want”. Perhaps this article shows that balsam firs and algific talus slopes extended further south in the past, or that Native Americans had complex trade networks earlier than we thought.

 

Works Cited

Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. A global treasure. https://www.inhf.org/about-us/blog/2025/09/11/a-global-treasure. 

Green, W., & Parker, K. E. (2025). Precontact use of balsam fir (Abies balsamea) in Iowa, USA. Ethnobiology Letters, 16(1), 56–69. https://doi.org/10.14237/ebl.16.1.2025.1935.