Contribution to the European Pollen Database in Neotoma: a high-resolution pollen record from varved sediments of Holzmaar, West Eifel Volcanic Field (Germany)

Although high-resolution palynological analyses of the Holzmaar sediment record were completed in the late 1980s, biostratigraphic interpretations of climatic developments and the settlement history are still lacking.Apart from an unpublished project report to the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Usinger and Wolf 1991), only a summarizing diagram of a subsection within a regional comparison of palynological and archaeological evidences for cultural changes during the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and some pollen-based corroborations of sedimentological interpretations have been published (Drfler et al. 2000;Zolitschka 1998Zolitschka , 2002)).For decades, this first pollen record from Holzmaar disappeared in the archives of the Botanical Institute of the University of Kiel.In the meantime, new sediment cores (composite profile HZM94-4a/4b) have been recovered and palynologically analysed, but with lower temporal resolution (Litt et al. 2009).More than 40 years after the coring expedition, we are now making this early record (Neotoma dataset name: HZM_BCD; ID: 64733) publicly available for further scientific study. Site descriptionThe volcanic crater lake of Holzmaar is located 425 m above sea level in the West Eifel Volcanic Field, which is part of the Palaeozoic Rhenish Massif (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany).Volcanic activity began with the uplift of the Rhenish Shield after 800 ka (Meyer and Stets 2002; Schmincke 2007) and resulted in numerous eruptive centres.The West Eifel Volcanic Field is the type region for phreatomagmatic "maar" explosions (Meyer 1985;Bchel 1993;Lorenz et al. 2020) and today comprises nine waterfilled maars (Schmincke 2014).Only the most recent maar eruption (Ulmener Maar) has been dated (Zolitschka et al. 1995), while for all other maars only estimates are available.