Soil archives provide valuable information on the past of the environment, in particular vegetation history (Costantini 2018). The aim of this thesis is study the feasibility of using the modern method of near-infrared spectroscopy to study the vegetation history of chernozems, using previously collected databases (Vysloužilová et al. 2015) to extract information from new sites along the grassland-woodland boundary in Minnesota, USA. The results are then analyzed and compared to known information and the results of more traditional approaches.