Burning questions: experiments on the effects of charring on domestic and wild sorghum

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• dc.contributor.author Beldados, Alemseged
• dc.contributor.author Ruiz-Giralt, Abel
• dc.date.accessioned 2024-01-08T06:57:20Z
• dc.date.available 2024-01-08T06:57:20Z
• dc.date.issued 2023
• dc.description.abstract Sorghum was first domesticated approximately 6000 years ago in the eastern Sahel region of Africa, but our understanding of its agricultural history is uneven due to the paucity of the available archaeobotanical evidence. Despite growing interest in the issue, sorghum response to fire exposure has been little investigated. In this paper, the resistance of six domesticated sorghum varieties (Sorghum bicolor) and one wild specimen (Sorghum arundinaceum) to charring was evaluated under oxidising and reduced oxygen conditions using temperatures ranging from 300 °C to 500 °C for 1–8 h. The experimental study in this work indicates that the maximum temperature wild sorghum can resist without severe distortion is around 300 °C, whereas domesticated varieties could resist up to 350 °C before becoming damaged beyond identification. Our findings suggest that resistance to temperature might represent an important bias for sorghum seed preservation, both in its wild and domesticated forms.
• dc.description.sponsorship This work was supported by the Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants under Grant AGAUR 2020 FISDU 00145, the European Commission under the Erasmus + International Credit Mobility programme (Action KA107) in collaboration with Pompeu Fabra University (Project Reference 2019-1-ES01-KA107-063586), and the RAINDROPS Research Project, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 framework (ERC-Stg 759800).
• dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
• dc.identifier.citation Beldados A, Ruiz-Giralt A. Burning questions: experiments on the effects of charring on domestic and wild sorghum. J Archaeol Sci. 2023;51:104170. DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104170
• dc.identifier.doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104170
• dc.identifier.issn 0305-4403
• dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/58637
• dc.language.iso eng
• dc.publisher Elsevier
• dc.relation.ispartof Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 2023;51:104170
• dc.relation.projectID info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/759800
• dc.rights © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/).
• dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
• dc.rights.uri http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• dc.subject.keyword Sorghum
• dc.subject.keyword Charring
• dc.subject.keyword Seed preservation
• dc.subject.keyword Seed identification
• dc.subject.keyword Experimental archaeology
• dc.title Burning questions: experiments on the effects of charring on domestic and wild sorghum
• dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
• dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion