How do our assumptions about peoples of the ancient past influence how we study them? This question preoccupied me in the early years of my Ph.D., when I had just begun to dip a toe in Late Pleistocene archaeology. More recently, it resurfaced as I was preparing a lecture for undergraduates at WashU. I told the story of a large statue that I had seen some years ago, at the entrance of an archaeological museum at Shuidonggou, which is a well-known Palaeolithic site in North China (Image 1a). This statue depicts people of some 20,000 years ago, who are imagined to be muscular pioneers, and – as inferred from the spear-carrying man in the front – hunters guiding their community across wild, dangerous terrains. The sculpture style strongly evokes parallels with communist monuments seen in many parts of China today (Image 1b), which, in turn, depict societal progress led by the Communist Manifesto, with guns on one side, and grain crops on the other.
Our inquiry into the past is often not detached from the context in which we portray ourselves in the present. Should it be detached though? Can it be, at all? Many paleoethnobotanists studying Late Pleistocene plant foodways look for evidence of early plant domestication. Underlying the significance of this research topic is the aforementioned juxtaposition of the ancient, wild, and hunted (and gathered) against the modern, tamed, and cultivated. It is a common belief that large-scale industrial agriculture feeds the world today. Without it, we would not be able to sustain large human populations. However, many experts argue otherwise, citing findings that small-scale and diversified farms are more common, and produce more food (and more types of food!) per hectare of land. This bias towards large-scale agriculture, and, arguably, agriculture at large, diverts our attention away from the sociocultural and economic significance of other foodways. It also leaves little room for giving significance to human-environmental interactions that do not fit well in agrocentric categories.
The use of vegetatively propagated plants, for instance, are largely missing from narratives of early foodways in Chinese archaeology, even though their roots and tubers are well represented in the modern diet and traditional medicine of China. Recent studies of microbotanical residue on stone tools in Late Pleistocene North China found evidence of using roots and tubers at Shuidonggou and Shizitan. More chronologically robust evidence is necessary. As such, one of the research objectives of my Ph.D. dissertation is to systematically collect and analyze macrobotanical remains from Late Pleistocene archaeological sites in North China. In the summer of 2018, I conducted flotation and excavated at Baimaying site (Image 2) in the Nihewan Basin, which is a key locality for multidisciplinary research on early human occupations in Northeast Asia. This spring, I will return to sort the collected flotation samples. In particular, I will pay close attention to identifying parenchymous remains (Image 3), which are macrobotanical evidence of roots and tubers in the archaeological record. This paleoethnobotanical data will then be analyzed in light of the contextual archaeological data, as well as compared to plant assemblages found recently in other Late Pleistocene to Early Holocene sites. This study will hopefully shed light on less discussed plant foods, as well as reflect on how we approach the study of early foodways in China.
