Pollen deposited on the ground surface is carried down into the soil by percolating groundwater. Such postdepositional pollen transport preserves the record of historical vegetation and land use in slowly or nonaggrading sediment profiles by separating the pollen spectra of successive ground covers. This is demonstrated at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania, where pollen spectra in hillside cores indicating a preagricultural-era forest are succeeded during the clearance and agricultural period by weed and cereal pollen during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are, in turn, replaced by grass during the park period of the last 65 years. The preagricultural pollen spectra indicate that differences in historical ground cover across relatively short horizontal distances and elevations can be reconstructed with pollen analysis.