The Science of Discovering the Past: Paleoethnobotany
Source: https://pixahive.com/photo/different-types-of-green-plants-grown-in-front-garden/
Plants have been important to hominids from the very first of our line. Understanding that connection is the milieu of paleoethnobotany or archaeobotany. Paleoethnobotany is the preferred term in North America, acknowledging the the 'contribution that ethnographic studies have made towards our current understanding of ancient plant exploitation practices' and archaeobotany is preferred in Europe as it 'emphasizes the discipline's role within archaeology'.
By Cmhenkel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104404554
As a field, paleoethnobotany is about 200 years old. In the early 19th century, the chance discovery of desiccated or waterlogged materials were the first macrofossiles that were researched by botanist C. Knuth in 1826 in Egypt and O Heer in Switzerland (respectively). Interest in plants in the North America didn't pick up until the 1930s when M.R. Gilmore and V.H. Jones studied dessicated remains in the American Southwest. These studies focused cataloging and simple identification of plants found in archaeological sites.
By Cmhenkel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104397525
During the 1950s and 1960s, researchers pushed for paleoethnobotany to be recognized as a subfield of archaeology. There were two main catalysts for this effort, the recovery of plant materials in the Near East and the publication of the report of excavations of Star Carr, a Mesolithic site about 8km from Scarborough in North Yorkshire. Together, these convinced the archaeological community that studying plant remains were important to the discipline.
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In the 1970s, the idea that archaeology was also anthropology, or Processul archaeology, caused a rise in the field of paleoethnobotany. New recovery methods, such as the flotation method, where water is used to separate the carbonized plant remains from sediment and a sieve is used to recover the fossilized plant remains. In the 1990s, Post-Processual archaeology or interpretative archaeology broadened the field to include topics such as 'food-related gender roles'.
By Cmhenkel - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104396223
More recently, techniques have improved in collecting and analyzing remains as well as the ability to find microfossils, allowing researcher to develop a fuller picture of how early hominids used plants. This also allows researchers to understand how intense agricultural labor was, how resilient settlements and hunter-gatherer groups were, and how these changed and influenced with long-term social and economic changes.
