Acta Palaeobotanica 59(1): 145–163, 2019 e-ISSN 2082-0259 DOI: 10.2478/acpa-2019-0001 ISSN 0001-6594 Vegetation and climate dynamics in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (NW Pakistan), inferred from the pollen record of the Kabal Valley in Swat District during the last 3300 years FAROOQ JAN 1*, LISA SCHÜLER 2, FAYAZ ASAD 3 and HERMANN BEHLING 2 1 Department of Botany, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Toru Road, Garden Campus, 23200, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan; e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Department of Palynology and Climate Dynamics, Albrecht-von-Haller-Institute for Plant Sciences, Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Untere Karspüle 2, 37073, Germany 3 Department of Botany, Bacha Khan University Charsadda, KPK, Pakistan Received 24 September 2018; accepted for publication 11 January 2019 ABSTRACT. We present a pollen-based palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the past 3300 years in the Kabal Valley of Swat District in the Hindu Kush mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, north-western Paki- stan. We studied the pollen record from 38 samples taken from a 150 cm long radiocarbon-dated sediment core in order to analyse the vegetation history of the area. Only the upper 76 cm of the core, with 20 samples recording the last 3300 years, had sufficiently preserved pollen. Conifers such as Pinus, Picea, Abies, Cedrus and Taxus, and herbs belonging to Poaceae, Cyperaceae and Amaranthaceae were found consistently throughout the period, at varying abundance. The vegetation reconstruction revealed that Cyperaceae and Poaceae dominated the conifers from 3300 to 300 cal yr BP. The decrease in herbaceous vegetation (mainly Poaceae) from 2400 to 1500 cal yr BP, and its increase from 1500 to 1200 cal yr BP, indicate contraction followed by expansion of grassland in the Kabal Valley of Swat, pointing to corresponding dry-cool and wet-warm periods.