ABSTRACT
Palaeoecology has come a long way since Iversen's classic demonstration, through pollen analysis, of prehistoric human impact on vegetation, although to read many ecological texts and papers one might not think so. The classic case is the study of hydroseres by Walker. This example of a direct refutation of the classical theory of wetland succession was scarcely mentioned in the decade that followed, despite the 1970s being a time of ferment in successional theory. The author own work of overturning a long-held theory of mire development was directly inspired by another paper by Walker and Walker and was again a case of a palaeoecological approach to a neoecological problem, as was Battarbee et al'. s test of different theories of lake acidification. It may be said that studies of lake and bog sediments are special cases and that, as Gee and Giller argue, many sediments contain only a distorted and partial representation of the full living community.
