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Plant domestication

Getting to the roots of tubers

Nature volume 395, pages 330–331 (1998)Cite this article

Old World archaeologists tracing the history of the cereals have many advantages over their New World colleagues. Grasses store their starch in tough seeds that are easily carbonized and preserved in an intact state, allowing them to be identified with precision to species level. The grasses also contain opal phytoliths — silica bodies with distinctive, often angular, shapes — that are relatively inert and survive after organic tissues have decomposed. Moreover, the domesticated cereals produce pollen grains with features that allow them to be separated from other grasses, providing opportunities for the history of cereal-based agriculture to be traced. By contrast, the Neotropical starch-producing root crops, such as manioc, have no identifiable phytoliths, produce few pollen grains and do not carbonize, so it has been difficult to work out their history.

Starch grains vary in size, shape and structure, and it has been claimed that they are distinctive enough to allow species determination2. So if starch grains could be found in a datable situation, they could provide evidence for the use of certain plants in the past — including the Neotropical root crops whose history has proved so elusive. The most obvious place to look for such starch grains is on the tools used for grinding and preparing food. It has been shown that the stone hunting weapons of prehistoric societies may carry traces of the victim's blood, and that the haemoglobin can be identified to species level3. It is possible that the rough surfaces of grinding tools could, similarly, carry a residue of informative starch grains.

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Figure 1: Ancient roots — heaps of harvested manioc (Manihot esculenta) for sale at a market.

P. KARUNAKARAN/HOLT STUDIOS

References

  1. Piperno, D. & Holst, I. J. Archaeol. Sci. 25, 765–776 (1998).

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  2. Banks, W. & Greenwood, C. T. Starch and its Components(Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1975).

  3. Loy, T. H. Science 220, 1269– 1271 (1983).

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  4. Loy, T. H. in Tropical Archaeobotany (ed. Hather, J. G.) (Routledge, London, 1994).

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  1. the Division of Life Sciences, Kings College, Campden Hill Road, W8 7AH, London, UK

    Peter D. Moore

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  1. Peter D. Moore
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Moore, P. Getting to the roots of tubers. Nature 395, 330–331 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/26364

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