Transfer Assemblage
Definition
The pollen recovered from clothing, a vehicle, or a body that reflects the environments the item or person has been in through the mechanism of Locard exchange.
- Content
- Pollen recovered from clothing, a vehicle, or a body
- Underlying mechanism
- Locard exchange
- Reflects
- Environments the item or person passed through
- Field
- Forensic palynology
Common questions
What can a transfer assemblage reveal that a single pollen type cannot?+
The combination of pollen species present, and their relative proportions, can indicate a specific sequence of environments or a particular season, rather than pointing to just one location or one exposure event.
What limits the reliability of pollen transfer assemblages as evidence?+
Pollen can arrive by secondary transfer, contact with an already-contaminated surface rather than the original source environment, so examiners must consider alternative explanations before attributing an assemblage to a specific place.
Related terms
- Grave-Fill Inversion
- The mixing or reversal of pollen stratigraphy caused by digging and backfilling a clandestine grave. Older, deeper pollen types brought to the...
- Pollen Assemblage
- The full complement of pollen and spore types recovered together from a sample, characterised by species identity and relative abundance. Assemblages are...
- Pollen Stratigraphy
- The analysis of pollen assemblages at different depth horizons within the grave fill to establish a seasonal or annual chronology. A pollen...
- Provenance
- The documented origin of a media file: the device that captured it, the time and location of capture, the chain of custody...
- Seasonal Marker
- A pollen type with a well-defined flowering season, used to estimate the time of year at which a person or object was...