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According to the core-periphery model of economic geography, the Medieval and Early Modern Czech lands can be called a semi-periphery. They are located in a hilly part of central Europe, in the shadows of the world’s naval powers. Over the centuries this location has greatly influenced their domestic consumer society, in many ways lacking in self-sufficiency and often having to rely on the import of foreign and exotic goods through a global sales network; amongst these rare goods were different kinds of spices. These imported species, specifically assimilated, became not only an important part of the diet, but also a symbol of luxury. This paper presents the current state of research into exotic spices that have been discovered in archaeological contexts in today’s Czech Republic, and illustrates their importance for the interpretation of trade in exotic goods and the historical socio-cultural level of local consumers. IANSA 2015 ● VI/2 ● 223–236 Michal Preusz, Kateřina Kodýdková, Petr Kočár, Zdeněk Vaněček: Exotic Spices in Flux: Archaeobotanical Material from Medieval and Early Modern Sites of the Czech Lands (Czech Republic) 224 dimension, showing the mechanisms in which the consumers of central European society operated (Orser 2008). 2. Materials and methods The data used in this article come from published Czech archaeobotanical research and also from unpublished data belonging to the authors of this article. Though in the articles the researched methods were not always discussed, most of the materials were processed by wet sieving with minimum sizes of mesh from 0.25 to 0.4 mm. Only one case of dry sieving was mentioned: being used to process dry material from the vault infill from Vladislav’s Hall in Prague (Table 1). Findings of spices clearly dominate in sediments from cesspits, followed by other wet contexts such as wells, water trenches and wet waste layers. Other findings come from dry contexts such as vault infills. In the series of published results, the archaeological context was not always clearly described, making it impossible to interpret the current situation (Figure 2). Archaeobotanical analyses answer many environmental and also archaeological questions. They bring insights to the reconstruction of landscapes in specific time periods and show changes in vegetational cover; for the archaeologist, they can reconstruct human impact and show the structure of settlement areas. Macro-remains also provide information about the origin and distribution of plant species, as well