This paper presents a comparison of archaeobotanical data with information about useful plants from the oldest (14th-15th century) written sources that have survived in the archives of Gdańsk, northern Poland. The main information on plant products, available in medieval documents from Gdańsk, concerns taxa traded by merchants as well as those used by the Teutonic Knights or the city council of Gdańsk. In these sources, as well as from many records about cereals, numerous spices and vegetables are listed which do not have counterparts in the archaeobotanical remains which have been found. On the other hand, the archaeobotanical data complement our knowledge on the use of common plants, both cultivated and collected in the wild, which written sources do not mention. This situation is most apparent in the case of local fruits like plums, cherries or berries, of which numerous remains are proof of their considerable popularity in Gdańsk. This would be impossible to conclude on the basis of historical documents only, whose attention is focused on the more expensive and imported plant products.

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HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Holocene history of Lac des Lauzons (2180 m a.s.l.), reconstructed from multiproxy analyses of Coleoptera, plant macroremains and pollen (Hautes-Alpes, France)

Large numbers of sub-fossil remains of the aquatic fern Salvinia natans (L.) All. have been found in several early medieval sites in Gdańsk, N. Poland. This record indicates a population expansion of this species around 7th-8th century A.D., similar to the recently observed rapid spread and high population dynamics of S. natans in northern Poland, which recent studies have attributed to climate warming. Our results suggest that in the Vistula deltaic area the S. natans expansion in the Early Middle Ages (7th-8th century A.D.) was similarly stimulated by climate warming, while its subsequent decline was mainly due to climate cooling, especially during the Little Ice Age. Warmer winters and springs and a longer growing season seem to be the most important factors forcing the expansion of S. natans in medieval times. According to our data, the co-occurrence of S. natans with other aquatic plant species was similar in both the medieval and presentday vegetation. Also, the high density of S. natans in the medieval population caused impoverishment of the local ecosystems in a way that has been observed in recent water bodies affected by invasive pleustophytes (free-floating plants).