The remains of ancient plants can provide a wealth of archaeological information about a site, with many methods being available to the archaeologist engaged in extracting this data. Perhaps one of the most widely-known of these techniques, possibly because of its attractive nature, is pollen analysis - a technique developed in the early years of the twentieth century by, like so many archaeological techniques, a geologist -- the Norwegian Lennart van Post. To understand the technique and the uses to which it may be put, we must first examine the biological nature of the material itself. Because of a hard outer shell - the exine - pollen i