Plants are essential to understanding the Plum Bayou culture, just as pottery, stone tools, and mounds are. Through specialized techniques, archeologists recover and analyze plant remains from archeological sites such as Toltec Mounds. One method, flotation, separates carbonized plant material from soil samples so that small seeds, wood charcoal, and plant fragments can be caught in fine screens and analyzed. Tiny seeds reveal how people planted, tended, harvested, and developed new relationships with the surrounding landscape. Paleoethnobotany studies relationships between people and plants through the archeological record, exploring how plants were used for food, tools, architecture, medicine, and more, how plant resources were managed, and what plants meant to past human societies.