Abstract
A key question in archaeobotany concerns the role of herbivore dung in contributing plant remains to archaeobotanical assemblages. This issue has been discussed for at least 40 years and has motivated several archaeobotanical studies on identifying dung-derived deposition of plant remains. Meanwhile, microarchaeological methods have developed and continue to be developed for detecting dung in archaeological sediments, and multi-proxy methodologies are being used to study the botanical components of dung-associated sediments. Combining these approaches, the authors recently led a study incorporating different botanical proxies (seeds, pollen, phytoliths) with geoarchaeological sedimentary analysis to compare dung pellets and associated sediments. This approach presents a new way to gauge the contribution of dung-derived plant remains in archaeobotanical assemblages, which is further explored in this follow-up paper. The present paper further highlights how multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of individual dung pellets can provide information on seasonality, grazing range and herding practices. Their short production and deposition time make herbivore dung pellets time capsules of agropastoral activity, a useful spatio-temporal unit of analysis, and even a type of archaeological context in their own right. Adding different biomolecular and chemical methods to future multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of herbivore dung will produce invaluable high-resolution reconstructions of dung microbiomes. Ultimately, unpacking the contents of ancient dung pellets will inform on the species, physical characteristics, diet, niche, and disease agents of the ancient pellets’ producers. Expanded datasets of such dung-derived information will contribute significantly to the study of ecosystem transformation as well as the long-term development of agriculture and pastoralism.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 137-153 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Vegetation History and Archaeobotany |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020, The Author(s).
Funding
This research was made possible thanks to the Rottenstreich Fellowship of the Israel Council for Higher Education (DF). The authors would like to thank Naomi Miller for conversations and information regarding the debate on dung-derived archaeobotanical assemblages, as well as Robert Spengler III, Michael Wallace, Ruth Pelling, and other colleagues whose conversations and encouragement at the 18th IWGP meeting in Lecce contributed to the writing of this manuscript. In addition, we thank Matthew Collins and two anonymous reviewers whose comments improved this paper, and Nahshon Roche for editing assistance. We would also like to thank Ehud Weiss, Ruth Shahack-Gross, Guy Bar-Oz, Yotam Tepper, Dafna Langgut, Yoel Melamed, Don Butler, Xin Yan and Elisabetta Boaretto for all they taught us, in the course of our previous collaboration on multi-proxy dung pellet research, and in general.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Council for Higher Education |
Keywords
- Archaeobotany
- Archaeological dung
- Coprolites
- Geoarchaeology
- Multi-proxy study
- Palaeoethnobotany