Elsbeth Lange
Elsbeth Lange was a German palynologist at University of Hamburg. She worked in the fields of vegetation history, paleo-ethnobotany and archaeobotany.
Education and personal life
Elsbeth Lange was born in 1928 in Frankenberg, Saxony. Her parents Bruno and Margarethe Lange were a shoemaker and weaver, respectively. After attending elementary school and a commercial vocational school in Frankenberg, she was apprenticed in November 1944 and then employed in town administration first in Frankenberg and then in Stollberg and Chemnitz. In 1951 she started study and practical training that qualified her as a lower school teacher by 1953. Lange then had a post as a teaching assistant at the young naturalists station in Jena. She completed a distance learning course alongside her job, which earned her a qualification to teach middle school biology in 1957. In the winter semester of 1956/1957 she began studying biology at the University of Jena, which she completed in May 1961 with a biochemical thesis on methods of qualitative saponin detection and their applications to the study of Primulaceae.From 1960 until 1966, Lange was a research assistant at the Institute for Special Botany at the University of Jena. She received her doctorate on May 28, 1965, with a thesis on the history of vegetation. On September 1, 1966, she became a research assistant at the Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR in Berlin and remained there until 1988. On October 23, 1974, she completed her habilitation at the Botanical Institute of the University of Halle, part of the faculty of natural sciences. In the same year she became a corresponding member of the International Union for Quaternary Research. On September 1, 1984, she was appointed Professor by the GDR Academy of Sciences.
Botanical career
The majority of paleobotanists in Germany, unlike most other European countries, were men until the late 1940s because of the subject's close association with mining. Lange was thus one of the first German women to move into Quaternary botany. She made significant achievements in the subject. As well as studying the Quaternary period she also studied older material and collaborated with archaeobotanists in Germany and other countries. She employed electron microscopy to identify pollen, and then used this information to provide insight into land use in the past. This included open grassland areas converted to agricultural use as well as how this these changes were recorded in wetlands.Publications
Lange was the author or co-author of over 100 books and scientific publications up to 2002, and others since. They include:- Elsbeth Lange and Eike Gringmuth-Dallmer: Investigations into the history of vegetation and settlement in southern Thuringia. Rhöne Biosphere Reserve, Kaltensundheim 2001
- Elsbeth Lange, Lebrecht Jeschke and Hans Dieter Knapp: Ralswiek and Rügen. Landscape development and settlement history of the Baltic Sea island. Volume 1: The landscape history of the island of Rügen since the late glacial period.. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1986
- Elsbeth Lange and Wolfgang Heinrich, Hille Blumfeldt, Kurt Freytag : We identify plants. Kinderbuchverlag, Berlin 1978, 6th edition 1988; Also Aulis-Verlag, Köln 1981,
- Elsbeth Lange, Botanical contributions to Central European settlement history. Results on the economy and cultural landscape in early historical times. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1971
- Egon Köhler & Elsbeth Lange Grana 18 pp 133–140