Site was on the edge of a Pleistocene lake A 9,500 year old hunter-gatherer camp. Archaeologist Grahame Clark used pollen to show that a small platform of birch samplings lay on waterlogged mud among reeds and birch forest which extended to the edge of a small lake. Lange-Ferguson site is SD is a mammoth kill and butchering site, now along the White River in the shows that the area once had spruce forest and the animal was killed in a bog, hardly what one expects when seeing the area today. Tree ring analysis and regional climate. A bit easier to deal with.
Dietary analysis is a crucial component.
Sometimes we find actual remains of what people eat. Tollund, Lindow, and other bog people, as well as Otsi, the Iceman, had their last meal still in their stomachs. Tollund had remains of finely ground porridge made from barley, linseed, and several wild grasses-no meat. Lovelock Cave in Utah had great preservation and lots of coprolites. Showed that people were eating bulrush and cattail seeds, chubs from the nearby lake.