Analysing Plant Remains

Abstract

Plant remains provide an extremely important source of evidence on ancient environments, chronology, and the production and use of plants for food and other purposes. Their analysis is complex, however, and even identification of taxa requires years of very specialized training and many hours of eye-straining work. Among the issues to keep in mind when interpreting archaeobotanical data are sample size, quantification, and differences in production, transportation, and preservation of plant remains of different types and in different contexts.