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Grinding stones have provided a convenient proxy for the arrival of agriculture in Neolithic China. Not any more. Thanks to high-precision analyses of use-wear and starch residue, the authors show that early Neolithic people were mainly using these stones to process acorns. This defines a new stage in the long transition of food production from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Keywords: China, Neolithic, grinding stones, querns, millet, acorns, agriculture, Introduction The Peiligang culture (c. 7000-5000 BC) represents the earliest Neolithic settlement in the Middle Yellow River Valley and signals the emergence of food production and ritual complexity in the [...]

Sediments from ash pits and cultural layers at the Peiligang and Yangshao period site of Zhuzhai, near Zhengzhou on the Yellow River, were floated to recover charred macrobotanical remains. In addition to cereals including domesticated broomcorn and foxtail millet and rice, charred nutshells, tubers, and fruits were recovered, presenting a full picture of subsistence during the initial stages of plant domestication in north China. Charcoal fragments and seeds from the samples were directly dated to the middle Peiligang period (c. 7924 ± 41 to 7640 ± 45 cal. BP), making these among the oldest domesticated broomcorn and foxtail millet seeds in the world. Artifact similarities between Zhuzhai and Jiahu and the presence of only wild Setaria sp. seeds at Jiahu but domesticated Setaria italica seeds at Zhuzhai indicate that the central plains region of China during the middle Peiligang (8000–7500 cal. BP) is likely the time and region where foxtail millet (Setaria italica) was first domesticated. Charred nutshell fragments from the Peiligang period at Zhuzhai weighed approximately 8 g, while charred seeds totaled only 1.9 g, suggesting nuts were more important than seeds and domesticated cereals in middle Peiligang subsistence and indicating a slow uptake of cereal crop domestication. The presence of charred fruit fragments (0.08 g) and tubers (0.09 g) denotes the use of wild resources in early agricultural society. By the late Yangshao period (c. 5169 ± 89 cal. BP), wood charcoal fragments in the samples weighed 1.3 g, nutshell fragments weighed 0.7 g, and seeds weighed 0.1 g, indicating that even after cereal domestication the use of wild and gathered resources such as nuts was still important. The Zhuzhai site places early cereal domestication in context and provides a well-rounded picture of plant-based subsistence at this formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charred grass seeds recovered by flotation from the late Upper Paleolithic Shizitan Locality 9 site in Shanxi province, China, are examined in relation to claims based on starch grain and phytolith analysis of early millet domestication and Neolithic plant foods in North China. Small numbers of wild millet (Paniceae tribe) grasses and goosefoot (Chenopodium sp.) seeds provide the first specific macrobotanical evidence for the association of these important plants with people in China during the late Paleolithic. Wild Setaria and Echinochloa spp. are present between 13,800 and 11,600 cal. BP, almost 4000 years before the earliest evidence of unequivocally domesticated millet macrofossils in the Yellow River region by c. 8000–7600 cal. BP. In fact, seed evidence for the process of foxtail millet domestication in North China has not been available until now, and these are the only late Upper Paleolithic seeds ever recovered from North China. This study suggests that domestication-related traits in foxtail millet were gradually established over several millennia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three grinding stones from Shizitan Locality 14 (ca. 23,000-19,500 calendar years before present) in the middle Yellow River region were subjected to usewear and residue analyses to investigate human adaptation during the last glacial maximum (LGM) period, when resources were generally scarce and plant foods may have become increasingly important in the human diet. The results show that these tools were used to process various plants, including Triticeae and Paniceae grasses, Vigna beans, Dioscorea opposita yam, and Trichosanthes kiriowii snakegourd roots. Tubers were important food resources for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and Paniceae grasses were exploited about 12,000 y before their domestication. The long tradition of intensive exploitation of certain types of flora helped Paleolithic people understand the properties of these plants, including their medicinal uses, and eventually led to the plants' domestication. This study sheds light on the deep history of the broad spectrum subsistence strategy characteristic of late Pleistocene north China before the origins of agriculture in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first historic Chinatown in San Jose, California, was occupied from 1866 to 1887. The Market Street Chinatown was excavated in the 1980s; artifacts have since been analyzed through Stanford University and community partners. While artifacts from the Market Street Chinatown have been studied extensively, the viability of botanical analyses within the curated collection has only recently been tested. This study evaluates the potential for survival and recovery of starch and microfossil residues extracted from 15 ceramic artifacts. Microfossils were also recovered from 12 sediment samples associated with these artifacts. Research on the macro- and microfossils associated with these sediments indicated that the sediments were postdepositional and therefore did not relate to the human use of the artifacts. The significant differences between sediment recovered from within the artifacts and residues recovered from the surface of the artifacts indicate a lack of contamination of preserved residues. This paper describes the recovery of rice-like starch residues from glazed porcelaneous stoneware and whiteware artifacts within the collection. This is the first published study to extract starch materials from nineteenth-century glazed ceramics from within an historic overseas Chinese community assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]