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December 2023
Vol. 11, No. 12
The Wheat From the Chaff: What We Can Learn From Studying Plants in Antiquity
By Jennifer Ramsay
Fig. 1: The author performing flotation at Caesarea Maritima. Photo by L. Ramsay.
Plants are a fundamental part of human’s evolutionary history and undoubtedly, we would not exist without them. Plants provide us with the air we breathe, building materials, fibers for textiles, and of course the food we eat. However, unlike other types of material culture (like ceramics), it took a good deal of time for the field of Archaeobotany (or Paleoethnobotany) to develop. Much like separating the wheat from the chaff, learning how to recover often small, charred fragments of ancient plants from the surrounding sediment was a process. It was not until the 1970’s when the flotation method of recovery (fig.1) was employed that the field really came into its own.
The recovery and identification of plant remains from archaeological contexts help us to understand the ecology, environment, and natural economy of the past as well as the changes that took place in the cultural landscape due to anthropogenic or natural processes. Archaeologists have realized the importance of broad-scale botanical investigations and that the focus should not only be on cultivated crops but also on the associated weed species, as many weed species have very specific habitats and can tell us a great deal about the surrounding area (fig. 2).
Fig. 7: Charred grape pip from the Petra Garden and Pool Complex. Photo by J. Ramsay.
Fig. 8: Mezereon sp. (Thymelea passerina) from pigeon dung recovered from Shivta, Israel Photo by J. Ramsay.
It was hoped that the botanical data from the Petra Garden and Pool Complex project (fig. 6), directed by Leigh-Ann Bedal, could address the question of what plants were growing in the garden. However, this was not possible, as unless the garden was intentionally burned, it is unlikely that the seeds of the garden plants would have carbonized and survived in the archaeological record. While many of the species of plant identified elsewhere at the site are the types of plants — grape vines (fig. 7), and fruit and nut trees — that would be expected to be growing in a pleasure garden in the Hellenistic/Roman Near East, there was no direct archaeological evidence that these species were being cultivated on the garden terrace. Nonetheless, this work provides insight into the larger agrarian landscape through the variety of species recovered from the site and demonstrates the feasibility of identifying garden plants in antiquity by using macrobotanical remains.
Plant materials recovered from pigeon dung from the Roman and Byzantine period site of Shivta, in the Negev Desert, have provided direct evidence for pigeon diet in antiquity, which showed that the pigeons ate grapes, figs, olives, dates, as well as several weed species, like mezereon (fig. 8), canary grass and fat hen. The botanical remains recovered from the dung taken from a dovecote (fig. 9) also illustrate that the environment around Shivta, which today is mostly barren desert, was likely much more verdant in antiquity.
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