Burned seeds from a gold rush store in Sacramento, California

Abstract

More than 13,000 identifiable carbonized seeds and fragments were recovered from the charred remains of a Sacramento general store which burned in November, 1852. Thirteen species of plants are represented in the collection, including three kinds of grain, two wild grasses, and eight food and spice plants. The seed assemblage illustrates several topics related to gold rush merchandising, frontier diets, and mid-19th-century commercial agriculture.