https://archive.org/details/naturalist1906west/page/126/mode/1up page 126 Archæophytes (Rikli), plants which have occurred constantly with us since pre-historic times, originally, however, growing wild nowhere in the country, field and garden weeds, […] https://archive.org/details/naturalist1906west/page/127/mode/1up page 127 Further, the flora of the cultivated areas consists of a very heterogeneous element, e.g., the field weed flora is composed of at least two groups, the true Archæophytes […] and the spontaneous Apophytes […]

Anthropochorous plants are divided into (a) those introduced unintentionally, including ephemerophytes (casuals), epoikophytes (colonists, aliens) and archaeophytes (naturalised plants), and (b) those introduced intentionally, including ergasiphytes (foreign cultivated plants) and ergasiphygophytes (escapes from cultivation).

It may be doubtful whether the three species first mentioned should more properly be regarded as archæophytes, since they also occur outside the actually cultivated soil; […]

N. Eur. an archæophyte, following the cereals, Færoes one place, but here noticed with an interval of 30 years.

Carduus acanthoides […] In Central Bohemia an archeophyte growing in a variety of ruderal habitats (dumps, railroads, construction areas, waste places), in pastures, and abandoned fields.

[A]rcheophytes are adapted to habitat types created early in history, including pastures, fields, and their edges; many of the neophytes, on the other hand, occur predominantly in ruderal, industrial, and urban habitats. […] [T]he proportion of neophytes is much higher in the flora of Berlin than in adjacent non-urban areas, but no difference was found for archeophytes.

The separation between natives and archeophytes relies on a combination of paleobotanical, archeological, ecological, and historical evidence (archeophytes and neophytes are absent from the fossil record in the last glacial period, the late glacial, and the early post-glacial). Archeophytes are often known from archeological evidence to have been present in prehistoric times.

Archaeophytes, or aliens that arrived through man's cultural activity and applied for a residency permit more than 500 years ago, can be accepted but are apologised for. Neophytes, aliens that have had an assisted passage since 1500, are beyond the pale, and never protected. Nevertheless, some of these may be of both cultural value and international conservation concern, like Lady Amherst's pheasant in Bedfordshire, just as much as those threatened archaeophyte weeds.

Many taxa that are rare as natives are much commoner than aliens; only the native (or archaeophyte) distribution is considered for present purposes.

Of the 1,459 total number of species inventoried, 13.6% were archaeophytes (introduced before 1500), 15.4% neophytes (introduced after 1500), and 71.0% native species.

In the past, species now considered to be archaeophytes have been variously treated as native or alien, but in the twentieth century in Britain they were most often considered as mainly native, e.g. by Clapham et al. (1952), Dandy (1958).

Archaeophytes were introduced before modern times – that is, before the year of 1492 (≈1500 AD), when Christopher Columbus reached the coasts of the American continent. Archaeophyte tree or shrub species were introduced, for instance, by the Romans or the ancient Greeks from Central Asia or Persia.

As a consequence of the human displacements which occurred in Southern Europe from the East to the West, archeophytes (i.e. the exotic species that were introduced before 1500) were established in Western European territories such as the Iberian peninsula.

Habitats affected (or degraded) and fragmented by man's activity were, beginning with the Neolithic, often invaded by apophytes and archeophytes and over the past 500 years also by neophytes.

Archaeophyte

Meaning

Noun

Synonyms

Antonyms