Comparable quantification methodologies in archaeobotany – a workin-progress and debate

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• dc.contributor.author Bates, Jennifer
• dc.contributor.author Jiménez Arteaga, Carolina
• dc.date.accessioned 2024-05-03T06:01:11Z
• dc.date.available 2024-05-03T06:01:11Z
• dc.date.issued 2024
• dc.description Data de publicació electrònica: 6 de gener del 2024
• dc.description.abstract The way archaeobotanists name and quantify seed fragments is a determinant step not only in the interpretation of a given macrobotanical assemblage, but also in the degree of comparability across different sites. However, seed terminology and quantification have yet not been standardised among scholars but rely on the various geographical and laboratory traditions, as well as specific research needs and circumstances. This has created two major biases: first, the main focus has been put on plants of economic importance, specially Near Eastern and European cereals (barley, wheat, rye and oats); and second, while there has been notable discussion about quantification methods such as ubiquities, densities, proportions, or more complex multivariate statistics, there is often little explicit discussion of the actual first counting stage (i.e. how one goes from things under a microscope to things in raw data or how the Minimum Number of Individuals -MNI- is calculated). In the case of South Asian archaeobotany, the economic role of other cereal species (e.g. millets, rice) and non-cereal crops (e.g. pulses, oilseeds), as well as the usually high fragmentation state in which macrobotanical remains are found, lead us to reflect on the need to establish a more accurate and comparable quantification methodology in the region. We believe that applying this to all seed fragments will also be an important tool to better understand the role of wild taxa (e.g. fruits) in ancient diets and improve the potential contribution of weeds to disentangle past agricultural systems. In this paper, we propose a new work-in-progress terminology and counting method which, far from concluded, is intended to be a starting point for future fruitful debate and development.
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Bates J, Jiménez-Arteaga C. Comparable quantification methodologies in archaeobotany – a workin-progress and debate. Veg Hist Archaeobot. 2024. DOI: 10.1007/s00334-023-00982-6
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00334-023-00982-6
• dc.identifier.issn 0939-6314
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/59986
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Springer
• dc.relation.ispartof Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 2024.
• dc.rights © The Author(s) 2024 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/.
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Quantification
• dc.subject.keyword Terminology
• dc.subject.keyword Methodology
• dc.subject.keyword Identification
• dc.subject.keyword MNI
• dc.subject.keyword Comparability
• dc.title Comparable quantification methodologies in archaeobotany – a workin-progress and debate
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion