Isotopic and microbotanical insights into Iron Age agricultural reliance in the Central African rainforest

The emergence of agriculture in Central Africa has previously been associated with the migration of Bantu-speaking populations during an anthropogenic or climate-driven ‘opening’ of the rainforest. However, such models are based on assumptions of environmental requirements of key crops (e.g. Pennisetum glaucum) and direct insights into human dietary reliance remain absent. Here, we utilise stable isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N, δ18O) of human and animal remains and charred food remains, as well as plant microparticles from dental calculus, to assess the importance of incoming crops in the Congo Basin. Our data, spanning the early Iron Age to recent history, reveals variation in the adoption of cereals, with a persistent focus on forest and freshwater resources in some areas. These data provide new dietary evidence and document the longevity of mosaic subsistence strategies in the region

The seeds of divergence: the economy of French North America, 1688 to 1760

Generally, Canada has been ignored in the literature on the colonial origins of divergence with most of the attention going to the United States. Late nineteenth century estimates of income per capita show that Canada was relatively poorer than the United States and that within Canada, the French and Catholic population of Quebec was considerably poorer. Was this gap long standing? Some evidence has been advanced for earlier periods, but it is quite limited and not well-suited for comparison with other societies. This thesis aims to contribute both to Canadian economic history and to comparative work on inequality across nations during the early modern period. With the use of novel prices and wages from Quebec—which was then the largest settlement in Canada and under French rule—a price index, a series of real wages and a measurement of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are constructed. They are used to shed light both on the course of economic development until the French were defeated by the British in 1760 and on standards of living in that colony relative to the mother country, France, as well as the American colonies. The work is divided into three components. The first component relates to the construction of a price index. The absence of such an index has been a thorn in the side of Canadian historians as it has limited the ability of historians to obtain real values of wages, output and living standards. This index shows that prices did not follow any trend and remained at a stable level. However, there were episodes of wide swings—mostly due to wars and the monetary experiment of playing card money. The creation of this index lays the foundation of the next component. The second component constructs a standardized real wage series in the form of welfare ratios (a consumption basket divided by nominal wage rate multiplied by length of work year) to compare Canada with France, England and Colonial America. Two measures are derived. The first relies on a “bare bones” definition of consumption with a large share of land-intensive goods. This measure indicates that Canada was poorer than England and Colonial America and not appreciably richer than France. However, this measure overestimates the relative position of Canada to the Old World because of the strong presence of land-intensive goods. A second measure is created using a “respectable” definition of consumption in which the basket includes a larger share of manufactured goods and capital-intensive goods. This second basket better reflects differences in living standards since the abundance of land in Canada (and Colonial America) made it easy to achieve bare subsistence, but the scarcity of capital and skilled labor made the consumption of luxuries and manufactured goods (clothing, lighting, imported goods) highly expensive. With this measure, the advantage of New France over France evaporates and turns slightly negative. In comparison with Britain and Colonial America, the gap widens appreciably. This element is the most important for future research. By showing a reversal because of a shift to a different type of basket, it shows that Old World and New World comparisons are very sensitive to how we measure the cost of living. Furthermore, there are no sustained improvements in living standards over the period regardless of the measure used. Gaps in living standards observed later in the nineteenth century existed as far back as the seventeenth century. In a wider American perspective that includes the Spanish colonies, Canada fares better. The third component computes a new series for Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is to avoid problems associated with using real wages in the form of welfare ratios which assume a constant labor supply. This assumption is hard to defend in the case of Colonial Canada as there were many signs of increasing industriousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The GDP series suggest no long-run trend in living standards (from 1688 to circa 1765). The long peace era of 1713 to 1740 was marked by modest economic growth which offset a steady decline that had started in 1688, but by 1760 (as a result of constant warfare) living standards had sunk below their 1688 levels. These developments are accompanied by observations that suggest that other indicators of living standard declined. The flat-lining of incomes is accompanied by substantial increases in the amount of time worked, rising mortality and rising infant mortality. In addition, comparisons of incomes with the American colonies confirm the results obtained with wages— Canada was considerably poorer. At the end, a long conclusion is provides an exploratory discussion of why Canada would have diverged early on. In structural terms, it is argued that the French colony was plagued by the problem of a small population which prohibited the existence of scale effects. In combination with the fact that it was dispersed throughout the territory, the small population of New France limited the scope for specialization and economies of scale. However, this problem was in part created, and in part aggravated, by institutional factors like seigneurial tenure. The colonial origins of French America’s divergence from the rest of North America are thus partly institutional

Fingerprinting Starch Degradation Products: Chemical Species of Interest to Ancient Starch Research

Molecular degradation of heteroatom rich biopolymers such as polysaccharides is to be expected in archaeological samples, and these must show damage proportional to the taphonomic environment where they belong. The exceptional preservation of native starch granules extensively reported in archaeological sciences remains unexplained. Amino acids and starch react to create complex mixtures of heteroatom-containing products known as melanoidins. Their compounds have a wide range of molecular weights and geochemical species. Some of them are refractory and, if found in archaeological contexts, they could be utilized as proxies of the burial environment and starch precursors. While all the melanoidins show the same basic distribution of heteroatom groups and/or DBE distributions, clear differences among starch taxa do emerge. After the endogenous starch structures and chemistries from native starch granules have been lost to degradation, FTICR-MS is an analytical window to characterize starchy residue. Thus, there is potential for recognizing taxonomic signals in the Maillard reaction degradation products that remain on archaeological residues from stone tools, ceramics, dental calculus, and sediment

Structural characterization and decontamination of dental calculus for ancient starch research

Ancient dental calculus research currently relies on destructive techniques whereby archaeological specimens are broken down to determine their contents. Two strategies that could partly remediate a permanent loss of the original sample and enhance future analysis and reproducibility include: 1) structural surface characterization through spectroscopy along with crystallographic and spectroscopic analysis of its molecular structure, and 2) surface decontamination protocols in which the efficacy of cleaning dental calculus prior to extraction is demonstrated. Dental calculus provides ancient starch research a niche where granules may be adsorbed to minerals, coated, overgrown, entrapped, and/or protected from chemical degradation. While encapsulation offers protection from degradation, it does not shield the sample’s surface from contamination. The most common approach to retrieving microbotanical particles from archaeological calculus has been the direct decalcification of the sample, after a cleaning stage variously consisting of immersion in water, acids, and mechanical dislodgment via gas, sonication, and/or toothbrushes. Little is known about the efficiency of these methods for a complete removal of sediment/soil and unrelated microbotanical matter. In this paper, controlled laboratory experimentation leads to chemical structural characterization and a decontamination protocol to eradicate starch granules. Several concentrations of acids, bases, and enzymes were tested at intervals to understand their potential to gelatinize and fully destroy starch granules; arriving at a procedure that effectively eradicates modern starch prior to dissolution without damaging the matrix or entrapped starch microremains. This is the first attempt at creating synthetic calculus to understand and systematically test effective decontamination protocols for ancient starch research

Morphometrics of Starch Granules from Sub-Saharan Plants and the Taxonomic Identification of Ancient Starch

The assumption that taxonomy can be ascertained by starch granule shape and size has persisted unchallenged since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century biochemistry. More recent work has established that granule morphological affinity is scattered throughout phylogenetic branches, morphotype proportions vary within the genus, granules from closely related genera can differ dramatically in shape, and size variations do not reflect phylogenetic relationships. This situation is confounded by polymorphism at the species and tissue level, resulting in redundancy and multiplicity. This paper classifies morphological features of starch granules from 77 species, 31 families, and 22 orders across three African ecoregions. This is the largest starch reference collection published to date, rendering the dataset uniquely well suited to explore i) the diagnostic power of unique morphometric classifiers and their frequency, ii) morphotypes that cut across taxonomic boundaries, and iii) issues surrounding the minimum counts needed to accurately reflect granule polymorphism, variability, and identification. In a collection of 23,100 granules, taxonomic identification occurred very rarely. In the instances it did, it was at the species level, with no occurrences of a single morphotype or complement identifying all species within a family or genus. Some families cannot be uniquely identified, and morphometric types are shared despite taxonomic distance for three quarters of the taxa. However, this reference collection boasts 98 unique identifiers located in the Arecaceae, Convolvulaceae, Cyperaceae, Dioscoreaceae, Fabaceae, Musaceae, Pedaliaceae, Poaceae, and Zamiaceae

Morphometrics of Starch Granules from Sub-Saharan Plants and the Taxonomic Identification of Ancient Starch

The assumption that taxonomy can be ascertained by starch granule shape and size has persisted unchallenged since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century biochemistry. More recent work has established that granule morphological affinity is scattered throughout phylogenetic branches, morphotype proportions vary within the genus, granules from closely related genera can differ dramatically in shape, and size variations do not reflect phylogenetic relationships. This situation is confounded by polymorphism at the species and tissue level, resulting in redundancy and multiplicity. This paper classifies morphological features of starch granules from 77 species, 31 families, and 22 orders across three African ecoregions. This is the largest starch reference collection published to date, rendering the dataset uniquely well suited to explore i) the diagnostic power of unique morphometric classifiers and their frequency, ii) morphotypes that cut across taxonomic boundaries, and iii) issues surrounding the minimum counts needed to accurately reflect granule polymorphism, variability, and identification. In a collection of 23,100 granules, taxonomic identification occurred very rarely. In the instances it did, it was at the species level, with no occurrences of a single morphotype or complement identifying all species within a family or genus. Some families cannot be uniquely identified, and morphometric types are shared despite taxonomic distance for three quarters of the taxa. However, this reference collection boasts 98 unique identifiers located in the Arecaceae, Convolvulaceae, Cyperaceae, Dioscoreaceae, Fabaceae, Musaceae, Pedaliaceae, Poaceae, and Zamiaceae

Morphometrics of Starch Granules From Sub-Saharan Plants and the Taxonomic Identification of Ancient Starch

The assumption that taxonomy can be ascertained by starch granule shape and size has persisted since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century biochemistry. More recent work has established that granule morphological affinity is scattered throughout phylogenetic branches, morphotype proportions vary within the genus, granules from closely related genera can differ dramatically in shape, and size variations do not reflect phylogenetic relationships. This situation is confounded by polymorphism at the species and tissue level, resulting in redundancy and multiplicity. This paper classifies morphological features of starch granules from 77 species, 31 families, and 22 orders across three African ecoregions. This is the largest starch reference collection published to date, rendering the dataset uniquely well-suited to explore (i) the diagnostic power of unique morphometric classifiers and their frequency, (ii) morphotypes that cut across taxonomic boundaries, and (iii) issues surrounding the minimum counts needed to accurately reflect granule polymorphism, variability, and identification. In a collection of 23,100 granules, taxonomic identification occurred very rarely. In the instances it did, it was at the species level, with no occurrences of a single morphotype or complement identifying all species within a family or genus. Some families cannot be uniquely identified, and morphometric types are shared despite taxonomic distance for three quarters of the taxa. However, this reference collection boasts 98 unique identifiers located in the Arecaceae, Convolvulaceae, Cyperaceae, Dioscoreaceae, Fabaceae, Musaceae, Pedaliaceae, Poaceae, and Zamiaceae

Soil and Plant Phytoliths from the Acacia-Commiphora Mosaics at Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania)

Abstract This paper studies soil and plant phytoliths from the Eastern Serengeti Plains, specifically the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The soil phytolith transect extends 100 ha and comprises 35 samples. Botanic collection was aimed at investigating the range of species present in the study area, learning about their phytolith production and morphotype characteristics, and comparing the botanical dataset with the soil group. We studied 29 species (20 genera, 15 families). Quantification aimed at discovering relationships amongst the soil and plant phytoliths relative distributions through Chi–square independence tests, establishing the statistical significance of the relationship between categorical variables within the two populations. For the soils we tallied 10,745 phytoliths (64 morphotypes grouped into 15 classes). Plants yielded 4,310 phytoliths (morphotypes = 52, classes = 13). In topsoils, the woody phytolith group dominates all terrain ranks, and appears to increase with denser plant cover, while grass phytoliths peak in sparsely vegetated terrain. The morphotypes from woody plants are led by the spherical class. The Poaceae produce ovates, towers, and horned towers. We provide a phytolith analog for the Acacia-Commiphora ecozone, explore whether soil phytoliths mirror the physiognomy and composition of vegetation aboveground, issues of catchment size, as well as time averaging, heterogeneity, and adequate sampling methods. From a phytolith perspective, this analog comprises seven phytolith classes: Four from woody tissue and three from grasses. In addition, we created a phytolith reference collection of characteristic plants from this ecosystem that can aid in the taxonomic identification of phytoliths from ancient sediments and soils

Soil and Plant Phytoliths from the Acacia-Commiphora Mosaics at Oldupai Gorge (Tanzania)

This paper studies soil and plant phytoliths from the Eastern Serengeti Plains, specifically the Acacia-Commiphora mosaics from Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania, as present-day analogue for the environment that was contemporaneous with the emergence of the genus Homo. We investigate whether phytolith assemblages from recent soil surfaces reflect plant community structure and composition with fidelity. The materials included 35 topsoil samples and 29 plant species (20 genera, 15 families). Phytoliths were extracted from both soil and botanical samples. Quantification aimed at discovering relationships amongst the soil and plant phytoliths relative distributions through Chi–square independence tests, establishing the statistical significance of the relationship between categorical variables within the two populations. Soil assemblages form a spectrum, or cohort of co-ocurring phytolith classes, that will allow identifying environments similar to those in the Acacia-Commiphora ecozone in the fossil record