The study of plants in the past is called archaeobotany. While much of archaeobotany involves the investigation of macroscopic remains---seeds, tubers, rinds, and the like---of late, that study has included microscopic forms of plants recovered from what are known as plant residues: pollen, phytoliths and, most recently, starches.
There have been lots of interesting studies on starches and simply I haven't been able to write about them, because I needed to do some homework on starches first. So here, for your reading pleasure, is a piece on starches, what they are, how they survive, what they're good for (in the archaeological sense). Later on, I promise to do some catching up on the interesting work recently published.
Comments