By exploring the early history of quantitative palynology, especially the cultural processes and material practices through which pollen became data and peat bogs turned into geological and biological archives, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how applied field science may give rise to basic laboratory science due to the articulation and establishment of a new type of data. In 1916, at the 16th Convention of Scandinavian Naturalists in Kristiania (Oslo), a novel quantitative method for the analysis of postglacial vegetation history was presented. The idea behind the method, later known as pollen analysis, was to utilise fossil pollen from peat bog deposits as data. In the historiography of palynology, this lecture by the geologist Lennart von Post (1884–1951), who delivered the lecture, remains a classic. Pollen from postglacial deposits had indeed been used before, but through the launch of the so-called pollen diagram, by which von Post was able to summarize and visualise a large amount of data, the method reached a breakthrough within quaternary geology and later also in archaeology. Quaternary geology, including historical plant geography, had its academic seats at the universities and state geological surveys. But when it comes to early quantitative pollen analysis, I will argue that it was strongly linked to a certain peat bog inventory, conducted in southern Sweden in the 1910s. The motive behind this state funded inventory was economical and political: to pave the way for a domestic peat industry and secure energy resources during World War I. In the end, the inventory did not affect the state of the nation at all, but it contributed to the development of pollen analysis, simply because it was data collected during this fieldwork that made up the empirical foundation for von Post’s method. The method was not without problems, however. One problem was how the pollen curves were to be interrelated chronologically; another had to do with credibility: were peat bogs really trustworthy as “archives”? In order to facilitate further studies, the Geological Survey stored the pollen samples from the inventory in a certain Pollen archive. Hence, one may say that the data travelled, from a natural archive to a scientific one.