Introduction -- Interactions between people and plants -- The biology and archaeology of starch grain research -- Approaches to and outcomes of plant processing -- Starch grain studies in the Delaware River Watershed and beyond -- Woodland Period plant use in the Delaware River Watershed -- The environment of paleoethnobotany
Summary
People regularly use plants for a wide range of utilitarian, spiritual, pharmacological, and dietary purposes throughout the world. Scholarly understanding of the nature of these uses in prehistory is particularly limited by the poor preservation of plant resources in the archaeological record. In the last two decades, researchers in the South Pacific and in Central and South America have developed microscopic starch grain analysis, a technique for overcoming the limitations of poorly preserved plant material. In Acorns and Bitter Roots, Timothy C. Messner establishes starch grain anal
