September 27–29, 2022

Realigning Ancient Foodways Models by Identifying Geophytes in the Archaeological Record

While grains dominated the post-paleolithic foodways around the world, it is the vegetative storage organs (VSO) that most likely supported many paleolithic people. These storage organs include corms, bulbs, rhizomes, stem, and root tubers. Students of the diets of ancient peoples are aware that geophytes (underground storage organs) have been crucial for human survival in many places and times, yet the techniques to identify them have been slow to develop, allowing most scholars to ignore the VSO’s participation in ancient diets. Over the past forty years, starch and phytolith studies have allowed archaeologists to identify the presence of storage tissues, but it is really only in the last decade that archaeobotanists have made progress with anatomical identification. Building on early work with better tools – applying the work of plant anatomists, more access to scanning electron microscopes and processing software – has increased the potential to develop systematic ways of identifying a range of storage organs and their diagnostic anatomy that could be harnessed by many more scholars around the world. This seminar will bring together active scholars of anatomical geophyte identification to compile effective diagnostic techniques of identification in order to produce a key to assist archaeologists in identification of storage tissue in the archaeological record.

Christine Hastorf, Chair
Director – McCown Archaeobotanical Laboratory, and Curator of South American Archaeology, University of California – Berkeley