Relationship Between People and Plants

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The study of the relationship between people and plants that Dennell is doing in his study of plant foods is otherwise known as paleoethnobotany. Larson’s study of the domestication of plants and animals in order to unearth the roots of complex societies (Larson 2014: 6139) and Kraft’s study of the domesticated pepper to help in our understanding of the beginning of agriculture are both examples of paleoethnobotany (Kraft 2014, 1). To recover plant remains, Dennell used a method known as froth floatation. The reason why Dennell used froth floatation was because it allowed him to obtain a better idea about how important a certain plant food was to an ancient community.

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In order to determine where in the plant process a plant food was, Dennell considered three variables: the composition of the sample found, the plant food’s context, and the size of the plant food. In the first sample of grains, by looking at the homogeneity of grains found at the Bulgarian excavation sites, Dennell could tell that those plant were very far in the plant process since only human hands could make sure that were weren’t that many weed seeds or straw fragments (Dennell 1978: 10).

In another sample, Dennell found it more difficult to tell where in the plant process the excavated plant foods were because there existed a larger amount of weed seeds and a greater variety in plant species. In order to tell if the sample consisted of seeds in the middle of the plant process or were simply the residue left after a plant processing activity, Dennell put modern plant foods through a sieve.

Similarly, in western Europe (in historical and recent times), weed seeds and smaller, unwanted seeds were removed from a crop by sifting it through a sieve. By doing this experiment, Dennell could see that the smaller grains, along with weed seeds, were going through the sieve and that they resembled the earlier excavated plant foods that were homogenous in composition and size; within the sieve, only the larger grains (just like the large, pure samples of grain from the first types of food grains excavated) with only a few weed seeds existed. Thus, Dennell was able to infer that the only reason for there being a difference between the samples was because the second sample of excavated seeds contained the material removed from the crop during cleaning, and those from the first sample represented cleaned crops due to grain cleaning (Dennell 1978: 10-11).

The last sample that Dennell found consisted largely of grains that still showed large amounts of weed seeds and spikelet fragments. This last sample also varied greatly in size. Because there were so many weed seeds and spikelet fragments, it was easy for Dennell to hypothesize that these food grains were from an early stage in the food process. However, this sample’s grains were all burnt. Because of this characteristic unique to this last sample, it was difficult to pinpoint the exact process that used for this sample. But, since most of the grains had been removed, this sample couldn’t have only been threshed since no part of the plant would have been removed if it were threshed. In addition, the sample couldn’t have possibly been winnowed since there existed larger grains mixed in with the smaller cereal grains. If the grains had been winnowed, there would have been far more cereal grains; vice versa, there would have been far fewer weed seeds and spikelet fragments. However, because these grains were burnt, this sample lends itself to have possibly undergone a mixture of these two plant processes. Thus, Dennell believed that this last sample’s seeds were freed by singing the ear over a flame and then beating the ear and that these grains were most likely in the preliminary process of dehusking (Dennell 1978: 11).