Starch Spherulites: What We Know and What Is Next for This Promising New Method of Paleoethnobotanical Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Starch spherulites are a promising new paleoethnobotanical discovery. Well-studied in food sciences, starch spherulites form when amylose from plant starch recrystallizes in spherulitic morphology. This requires processing by humans (mainly through heat, although pH impacts this dynamic) in an aqueous environment. The identification of starch spherulites in the archaeological record opens an exciting new line of research into baking, boiling, and other forms of food processing deep into prehistory. With several papers now published, including their initial description, where they were experimentally formed using traditional Maya maize processing techniques of nixtamalization (Johnson and Marston 2020), and their first archaeological identification, at the 23,000-year-old site of Ohalo II, Israel (Ramsey and Nadel 2021), followed by their discovery at a Maya site (Santini et al. 2022) and their recent recovery from early Pottery Neolithic ceramics in the Southern Levant (Ramsey n.d.), it is clear that starch spherulites will be found in many contexts and regions around the world. Accordingly, there is a need to outline best practices and begin a broader discussion with other interested paleoethnobotanists to establish a solid methodological foundation. To that end, this paper summarizes our current understandings of spherulite formation and preservation, and outlines future research directions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Advances in Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Archaeobotany Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38973.0