Abstract
Food, pharmacopoeia, funerary rituals... The interdependent relationships developed over the millennia between societies and plants have been preoccupying specialists in the analysis of pollen grains and plant spores since the 1960s (Roux 1967). Leaving aside palaeo-environmental reconstructions - often the prerogative of investigations into natural peat or lacustrine sequences - palynologists here aim to analyse the use of wild and domestic plants and what this means in terms of the practices of ancient communities and even the behaviour of people in the past. From the 1970s onwards, American palynologists began to tackle this methodological and conceptual obstacle by focusing their attention not just on the stratigraphic unit or the archaeological structure, but by incorporating into their study models the artefact produced by the hand of man himself (Hill, Hevly 1968). This was the birth of the 'Pollen Washes' technique.