Paleoethnobotany

The study of seeds, wood/charcoal, pollen, phytoliths and starches all require separate training, as slightly different techniques are employed for their processing and analysis.

[vague] The study of ancient plant remains began in the 19th century as a result of chance encounters with desiccated and waterlogged material at archaeological sites.

In North America, the first analysis of plant remains occurred slightly later and did not generate the same interest in this type of archaeological evidence until the 1930s when Gilmore (1931)[6] and Jones (1936)[7] analysed desiccated material from rock shelters in the American Southwest.

All these early studies, in both Europe and North America, largely focused on the simple identification of the plant remains in order to produce a list of the recovered taxa.

The implementation in the 1970s of a new recovery method, called flotation, allowed archaeologists to begin systematically searching for plant macrofossils at every type of archaeological site.

Increased emphasis on scientific analyses also renewed interest in the study of plant microbotanicals, such as phytoliths (1970s) and starches (1980s), while later advances in computational technology during the 1990s facilitated the application of software programs as tools for quantitative analysis.

Since the 1990s, the field has continued to gain a better understanding of the processes responsible for creating plant assemblages in the archaeological record and to refine its analytical and methodological approaches accordingly.

Research avenues also continue to explore new topics pertaining to ancient human-plant interactions, such as the potential use of plant remains in relation to their mnemonic or sensory properties.

[1][2] Interest in plant remains surged in the 2000s alongside the improvement of stable isotope analysis and its application to archaeology, including the potential to illuminate the intensity of agricultural labor, resilience, and long-term social and economic changes.

In 2018 a study of the Karnatukul site in the Little Sandy Desert of Western Australia showed evidence of continuous human habitation for around 50,000 years, by analysing wattle and other plant items.

In order to be recovered in the archaeological record, therefore, plant material must be subject to specific environmental conditions or cultural contexts that prevent their natural degradation.

The former occurs quite rarely, but a famous example comes from Ötzi, the 5,500 year old mummy found frozen in the French Alps, whose stomach contents revealed the plant and meat components of his last meal.

Impressions often result from the deliberate employment of plant material for decorative or technological purposes (such as the use of leaves to create patterning on ceramics or the use of chaff as temper in the construction of mudbricks), however, they can also derive from accidental inclusions.

Microbotanical remains (namely, pollen, phytoliths and starches) require completely different processing procedures in order to extract specimens from the sediment matrix.

Starch and phytolith identifications are also subject to limitations, in terms of taxonomical specificity, based on the state of current reference material for comparison and considerable overlap in specimen morphologies.

[37] Initially, paleoethnobotanical studies mostly involved a qualitative assessment of the plant remains at an archaeological site (presence and absence), but the application of simple statistical methods (non-multivariate) followed shortly thereafter.