ABSTRACT
Vegetation interpretation is among the most tangible tools for assessing past human presence in a landscape. Nevertheless, in the neotropics, due to the diversity and lability of human practices and to the different consequences they may have on forest regeneration, a probabilistic approach, supported by the compilation of hundreds of uses of hundreds of species, is needed. In this chapter, we will address how to build an efficient database and how to use it to answer historical-ecological questions in tropical areas instead of desperately searching for a single plant marker.
