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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]