Wood charcoal papers online

It recently came to my attention that last year's meet of archaeological charcoal analysts (mainly European), has a nice set of extended abstracts (or short papers) published freely on line as a special number of the Spanish periodical Saguntum. The wood charcoal papers are here, amongst which are number of interesting study, including a Irish study on quantification issues attempting to identify saturation points, the fragment count at which taxa diversity in a sample stops increasing: for Ireland this appear to be around 20 taxa. A French study develops the Dufraisse model for using charcoal ring diameters to model the size of fire wood being collected as a way into human behavioral patterns in wood exploitation (image at left). Eleni Asouti explores the wood charcoal from Catal Hoyuk which fits neither with a straight forward model of climate-driven change in taxa or anthropogenic over-exploitation models. Meanwhile a burnt down building from PPNB Qarassa in Syria provides a glimpse into the construction material used in early villages in the Levant. You can also find a small, but pioneering study of charcoal from Chinese flotation samples taken in a region survey, an analysis of some Yanghao-Longshan charcoal from the Ying valley in Eastern Henan-- which provides evidence for the dominance of oak forests, oak as fuel source, despite a seed record that is dominated by cultivated millets, lacking evidence for acorn consumption. Although we lack good earlier archaeobotanical evidence from this particularly region, it does still suggest a contrast with the earlier predominance of acorns elsewhere in China. By the Yangshao period agriculture had pretty much taken over and wild foods were in decline, although the Yangsaho period still shows a higher range of wild fruits than we find in subsequent periods in the Ying (see Zhang et al in J. Arch Sci 2010).

And there are many other charcoal studies there I have yet to explore.

New Journal for Archaeological Sciences (& Archaeobotany !)

We are now about two years into a new journal, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, which published archaeobotany as well as a broad swathe of other scientific approaches and applications in archaeology. It about almost two years since the initial editorial board was signed up, and the first articles were published in early 2009. Our 6th issue is in production now for June, and will be a special issue on rice (some of the articles are already on-line first). It might be useful to draw attention to some of the other archaeobotany, already published over the past year. This goes back to issue 1:1,

(1) with an article by Walton Green on a novel, visual approach to apprehending and displaying multivariate archaeobotanical data;

(2) soil micromophological site formation process of a South African Palaeolithic case by Goldberg et al.-- but with evidence for non-food uses of plants and depositional processes.

(3) A methodological student on charcoal reflectance by MacParland et al.-- this is an exciting new approach to extracting a new kind of evidence from archaeological charcoal, namely the maximum temperature, and to some extent the range of temperatures, reached by charcoal in a past fire. This should allow one to judge the temperatures used in different pyrotechnic activities, and I suspect there is untapped potential to get at independent estimates of the temperature reached by carbonized grains, which might better allow us to correct for shrinkage when look at archaeobotanical seed metrics.

(4) A study of the archaeobotany and small fauna from late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic Moli del Salt rock shelter by Ethel Allue et al. (2010),-- the evidence is mostly wood charcoal that indicates a mainly upland woodland was exploited for fuel, and a few seeds attest to gathering hawthorns, sloes and rosehips (not far off what we manage to gather with our undergraduate students each autumn on a trip down to Sussex), alongside a lot of hunting (or trapping) of rabbits, and fewer big game.

(5) Messager et al. (2010) report some even older seeds from the Lower Palaeolithic related site at Dmanisi, although it is not at all clear that Homo erectus/ergaster had anything to do with gathering these seeds.

(6) Weber et al. (2010) ask "Does size matter?" in this case is there some relationship between the grain size of crops (large grains like wheat or barley versus small grains of various millets) and the size of the settlements supported by those grains. They explore this through an overview of Harappan archaeobotany in which the an intriguing correlation between urban sites and dependence on large grains is indicated. An interesting approach to thinking comparatively and creatively over a wide region.

Keep archaeobotanical submissions coming. We aim to be eclectic in terms of region, period, type of plant remains (from phytoliths through charcoal), from shorter (and more speculative studies) to denser, more long-developed reviews.