Vegetation and fire histories can be reconstructed from pollen and charcoal preserved in sediments. Sequential changes in the amount of charcoal are attributed to past changes in fire regime and are sometimes used as indicators of aboriginal burning. One difficulty is the effect on interpretation of the sampling scheme: the number of years within each sample and the number of years between. Problems arising from the sampling scheme can be largely overcome by taking contiguous samples over the full length of a sediment core. A quick and easy method for doing this is introduced.