Plants in Prehistory: Tierra del Fuego, ethno-archaeology, shell middens, residues, use-wear analysis and experimentation to reconstruct the lost organic record for the Mesolithic of Northern Europe

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The control and management of plants for food is one of the most important discoveries ever made by humans and underpins life today. A knowledge of plant use in the pre and early-agricultural past is simply, crucial to our understanding of how and why plant domestication developed, the way agriculture became predominant, and what plants were important and why. But the key elements for understanding this, the plants themselves, normally do not survive in the prehistoric record. The aim of this application is to create a methodological framework to reconstruct the lost organic record of the Scottish Mesolithic using use-wear and residue analyses of stone tools. Use-wear analysis is used throughout Europe but rarely in Britain to reconstruct tool use and raw materials, while residue analysis which is a relatively recently developed method to extract and identify plants through extraction of starch grains and phytoliths, was developed and is used largely outside Europe.

Use-wear analysis is the study of microscopic traces created then left behind on the used edges of stone tools. The traces are diagnostic of worked raw materials and their identification is based on controlled, replicative experiments with known variables that determine the typical patterns that form the basis of archaeological interpretation. Residue analysis uses plant residues, for example starch grains that adhere to the used surfaces of stone tools during use thus providing empirical evidence of plant use in prehistory. Identification is morphological and carried out using modern control samples. A methodological and experimental framework will be created by using the ethno-archaeological record from Tierra del Fuego, a region that is very similar both geographically and environmentally to Scotland as well as having a very similar archaeological record and a recent past human population that was highly mobile and maritime as well as having a Stone Age

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