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Palms for the Archaeologist

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The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Part of the book series: Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research ((DPER,volume 22))

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Abstract

If your historical/cultural/linguistic past harks back to temperate Europe or colonial North America, and you speak English, when you think of trees you might envision apple (Malus), ash (Fraxinus), beech (Fagus), birch (Betula), cedar (Juniperus), chestnut (Aesculus), elm (Ulmus), hemlock (Tsuga), maple (Acer), oak (Quercus), olive (Olea), or pine (Pinus). Trees give shade, sugar, fruit, and nuts; trees underpin our material realm, providing studs, shingles, clapboards, rafters, keels, and masts. Trees serve as rich symbols, as metaphors for knowledge and life (the two trees of Genesis), death and afterlife (Calvary, Revelation 22), and a host of relationships (family trees, phylogenetic trees, cladograms). Nations often choose trees for symbolic representation: in Wikipedia’s listing of National Trees (accessed 2020), 17 out of 86 in the sample are members of the genus Quercus, the most named genus, associated with mainly European nations, English speaking or not. Four countries designate Pinus. Pinus is classified as neither monocot nor dicot sensu lato, as is also the case for cedar and hemlock, but rather as gymnosperms, aka Acrogymnospermae. The USA is one of the 17 nations that goes with oak; Canada opts for maple. Six countries (Cambodia, Columbia, Cuba, Haiti, Maldives, Saudi Arabia) picked palms—monocots—but by far the international leaning is toward dicot trees.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Conrad Helms and Brenda Rodgers for obtaining journal articles. The excellent comments of manuscript reviewer Georg Zizka were greatly appreciated, especially in regard to updating classification data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anthropology Department, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St Marys City, MD, USA

    Daniel W. Ingersoll Jr.

  2. Independent Researcher, St Marys City, MD, USA

    Kathleen B. Ingersoll

  3. Herbarium of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Fred W. Stauffer

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  1. Daniel W. Ingersoll Jr.
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  2. Kathleen B. Ingersoll
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Correspondence to Daniel W. Ingersoll Jr. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Botanic Institute of Barcelona (IBB), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Barcelona, Spain

    Valentí Rull

  2. Anthropology Faculty, School of World Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Christopher Stevenson

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Ingersoll Jr., D.W., Ingersoll, K.B., Stauffer, F.W. (2022). Palms for the Archaeologist. In: Rull, V., Stevenson, C. (eds) The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91127-0_15

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