There is no doubt that from the earliest stages of human evolution plants were consumed on a day-to-day basis. This is evident not only from human physiological adaptation to plant consumption. Plants were also a part of almost every past human activity, and were used as construction material for shelter, transportation, bedding, as an energy source for both heat and light, tools, medicine, clothing, dyeing material for fabric, and much more. Thanks to the application of a wide range of scientific methodologies the minute evidence of readily-detectable plant remains has been recovered from archaeological sites over one million years old (Brain & Sillent, Reference Brain and Sillent1988). However, a large gap in our understanding of the use of plants in the past still exists, as plants are fragile, often not evident to the naked eye, and thus not collected from archaeological assemblages.
Wild Harvest is an edited volume which attempts to overcome the problems mentioned above by greatly expanding our knowledge of the use of plants in pre-agrarian societies. The book starts with an editorial overview of the importance of plants and plant-related science in archaeology, describing the logic of the volume's structure and providing a detailed summary of plant use before agriculture. The latest theories on the contribution of plants to human evolutionary success are also reviewed.
The main body of the book is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Setting the Scene’, consists of five chapters, which provide information on the importance of plants both as food and raw material in pre-agrarian human societies and among apes, including the role of plants for our physiology. Copeland (Ch.1) discusses the importance of plant carbohydrates in the human diet, familiarising the reader with the complex chemical composition of this energy source. According to the author, carbohydrates are ‘chemically highly reactive’ (p. 24). It would therefore have been interesting in this chapter to find an explanation of the circumstances in which carbohydrates, starch in particular, can or cannot be preserved for later recovery. Chapter 2 by Butterworth et al. is a great example of interdisciplinary collaboration, in this case between life sciences/medicine and archaeology, in providing an overview from a physiological perspective of why humans need to consume plants. The authors also present an up-to-date review of theories addressing the important contribution of plants to the evolution of our species. Chapter 3 by Huffman explores the medicinal use of plants among African great apes, while Chapter 4 by Hardy reviews the use of plants as a raw material, from the earliest evidence of fires and bedding to ethnographic examples of various plant applications in pre-agrarian societies. Arranz-Otaegui et al. (Ch. 5) present a great summary of plant use in the pre-agrarian societies of southwest Asia during the period c. 21,000–10,000 bc, on the eve of the domestication of grasses and pulses, although the recent results by Snir et al. (Reference Snir, Nadel, Groman-Yaroslavski, Melamed, Sternberg, Bar-Yosef and Weiss2015a) regarding small-scale farming at the Ohalo II site (Tiberias, Israel) 23,000 years ago could have added more discussion material to this chapter.
The second section of the book, ‘Plants, Food, Tools and People’, is comprised of seven chapters, which mainly focus on the variety of methods available for the study of plant use. Chapter 6 by Kubiak-Martens is a wonderfully illustrated review of the use of roots and tubers in the Mesolithic diet, detailing solutions to the problem of analysing such fragile and therefore often under-studied plant tissues. Van Gijn & Little (Ch. 7) show the importance of plants in pre-agrarian societies by identifying the use wear made by siliceous plants on stone tools, confirmed by experimental work. In Chapter 8 Martinez et al. present a study of buccal dental microwear analysis as a way to differentiate between different types of diets in human populations, both modern and ancient, when inhabiting different environmental zones. The question which remains while reading this chapter is what minimum sample size is sufficient to make reliable conclusions, especially when inferring the dietary difference between Plio-Pleistocene hominids. Two sequential chapters by Albert & Esteban (Ch. 9) and Power et al. (Ch. 10) use phytoliths as a tool to identify the diet of early human populations, respectively in the Olduvai Gorge in east Africa and in the regions of pre-agrarian Natufian societies of south-west Asia where macrobotanical remains are almost absent due to preservation conditions. Besides acting as review articles, both of these chapters also provide primary data and detailed protocols on phytolith extraction, adding even more scientific value to this book. The chapter by Boyadjian et al. (Ch. 11) overviews research results regarding both human diet and environment from a multi-proxy analysis of the dental calculus from inhabitants of the Brazilian shell mounds. Chapter 12 by Hardy & Buckley provides a very well structured summary of stable isotope and other mass spectrometry methods (TD-GC-MS or Py-GC-MS) that are used to study different aspects of human diet from collagen, enamel, and a wide variety of biomarkers in various residues. Although the effects of climate or some aspects of human physiology on isotopic signatures are mentioned in this chapter, a few sentences on the influence of seaweed or fungi on isotopic signals could also have been added, as they constituted an important part of the diet in various past human societies (e.g. Introduction, p. 7; Ch. 3, p.65), and thus contributed to generating unique isotope distributions (Balasse et al., Reference Balasse, Tresset and Ambrose2006; O'Regan et al., Reference O'Regan, Lamb and Wilkinson2016).
Part three of the book, ‘Providing a Context: Ethnography, Ethnohistory, Ethnoarchaeology’, contains five chapters which provide data on the use of plants from various climatic zones in northern Europe, northern Australia, southern regions of South America, and east and west Africa. Despite being mainly concerned with fishing rather than plants, Chapter 13 by Conte et al. offers a review of the wicker technology of fish traps and other fishing equipment made of plant material. Brockwell et al. (Ch. 14) draw on both ethnographic and archaeological data to review a wide range of plant use by the indigenous populations of Australia. Rock art depicting various flora species is particularly fascinating, providing one more source to study past plant use and evaluate their importance to past populations. Berihuete Azorin et al. (Ch. 15) offer a review of plant species used by the Fuegian hunter-gatherers from southern regions of South America. By combining both ethnographic and archaeological data the authors present an overview of the ‘role of plants within the broader context of the other available food recourses' (p. 301). The importance of plant food, seasonal species variation, and gender differences in plant gathering is shown by Crittenden (Ch. 16) among Hadza hunter-gatherers of eastern Africa. Finally, Chapter 17 by Gueye & Ibra Samb reviews the species of wild plants gathered in west Africa, evaluating plant qualities and their value in the diet.
Wild Harvest is timely for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the contribution of science to archaeology not only allows the analysis of archaeobotanical remains at macro and micro scales, but has more recently opened up a whole spectrum of biomolecular solutions. Every archaeologist should be aware of these possibilities and a variety of questions about plant use in the past should be asked during each archaeological excavation, accompanied by adequate sampling, recovery, and analysis methods. Secondly, this book helps us to understand the physiological importance of plants in the human diet and also reminds us of the whole spectrum of plants that modern urban populations have long forgotten, having narrowed down the edible plant spectrum to just a few species. Our societies face many health issues due to reduction of our dietary diversity and this book opens a window to the knowledge of how we can learn from the past. It is fascinating, for example, that in New Guinea in the past century 1035 species representing 470 genera were known to be used (Powell, Reference Powell and Paijmans1976), while at the 23,000 year old Ohalo II settlement (Ch. 5) over 140 plant species were identified (Snir et al., Reference Snir, Nadel, Groman-Yaroslavski, Melamed, Sternberg, Bar-Yosef and Weiss2015a, Reference Snir, Nadel and Weiss2015b).
The book provides a good mixture of review and primary data; however the presentation could have benefited from better-illustrated material and maps of the regions under discussion (e.g. Ch. 16). While some chapters could be more focused on their research subjects, others could have offered more discussion of wild plant processing. This is true for Part Three in particular, since processing is crucial for making plants digestible (Ch. 2, p. 34) as well as helping archaeologists better understand tool assemblages that could well be linked with plant processing activities. It would have been great to have a chapter or part of a chapter on fungi. Even though they do not fall into the plant kingdom and form a kingdom of their own, fungi were an important part of the human diet and medicinal repertoire in the past (O'Regan et al., Reference O'Regan, Lamb and Wilkinson2016; Cao et al., Reference Cao, Wu and Dai2012) and still are today. In 2007 the estimated consumption of mushrooms in China was at 1,226,551 metric tons, while in Belarus it was 6800 tons (McCarty, Reference McCarty2010). The earliest evidence of direct mushroom consumption is available from Spain where spores of (most likely) Boletus genus were identified in human tooth calculus from Magdalenian individuals (Power et al., Reference Power, Salazar-García, Straus, Morales and Henry2015). Ethnographic data presented in Chapter 15 also show the importance of fungi in pre-agrarian societies across the world, but no discussion of their study is offered in this book.
Hardy (Ch. 12) outlines the importance of developing methodologies to analyse plants, yet due to plant fragility and possible contamination issues, some discussion of sampling techniques could have been added to each chapter that discusses methodologies. This would help the non-specialist to sample data properly, allowing the attainment of the best results in plant research.
The above comments do not cloud in any way the value of this book by Hardy and Kubiak-Martens and contributors. The volume offers a stimulating discussion of plant use by presenting examples of a successful dialogue between archaeological data and science. Once reminded of the important role of plants to more or less all human communities on earth, the need to find ways to study plants more intensively becomes clear, as otherwise a very partial picture of our past would be represented. I heartily recommend this publication to anybody interested in plants, their use in past and present non-agrarian societies, and the methodologies required to study them.
