Abstract
A key question in archaeobotany concerns the role of herbivore dung in contributing plant remains to archaeobotanical assemblages. This issue has been discussed for at least 40 years and has motivated several archaeobotanical studies on identifying dung-derived deposition of plant remains. Meanwhile, microarchaeological methods have developed and continue to be developed for detecting dung in archaeological sediments, and multi-proxy methodologies are being used to study the botanical components of dung-associated sediments. Combining these approaches, the authors recently led a study incorporating different botanical proxies (seeds, pollen, phytoliths) with geoarchaeological sedimentary analysis to compare dung pellets and associated sediments. This approach presents a new way to gauge the contribution of dung-derived plant remains in archaeobotanical assemblages, which is further explored in this follow-up paper. The present paper further highlights how multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of individual dung pellets can provide information on seasonality, grazing range and herding practices. Their short production and deposition time make herbivore dung pellets time capsules of agropastoral activity, a useful spatio-temporal unit of analysis, and even a type of archaeological context in their own right. Adding different biomolecular and chemical methods to future multi-proxy archaeobotanical investigation of herbivore dung will produce invaluable high-resolution reconstructions of dung microbiomes. Ultimately, unpacking the contents of ancient dung pellets will inform on the species, physical characteristics, diet, niche, and disease agents of the ancient pellets’ producers. Expanded datasets of such dung-derived information will contribute significantly to the study of ecosystem transformation as well as the long-term development of agriculture and pastoralism.
Highlights
Considering the centrality of livestock to agricultural and pastoral societies, there is still much to learn from the archaeology of herbivore dung, studied intensively for decades
In the field of archaeobotany, a key question concerns the role of herbivore dung in contributing seeds to archaeobotanical assemblages
We found that individual dung pellets can provide important information on seasonality, grazing range, herding practices, and potentially much more
Summary
Considering the centrality of livestock to agricultural and pastoral societies, there is still much to learn from the archaeology of herbivore dung, studied intensively for decades. The present authors recently led a study combining botanical proxies (seeds, pollen, phytoliths) with geoarchaeological methods to compare the botanical contents of dung pellets and associated sediments (Dunseth et al 2019) This approach suggests a new way to gauge the contribution of dung-derived plant remains to archaeobotanical assemblages, and move beyond this long-standing issue. Even among the herbivore domesticates of southwest Asia, significant differences abound between the diet and digestion, and survivability, of plant matter in bovine, ovicaprine, equine, and camelid gastrointestinal systems (Anderson and Ertug-Yaras 1998; Hastorf and Wright 1998; Tsartsidou et al 2008) Since these animals are often kept at the same site, and their dung may be combined in fuel use, many ethnoarchaeological studies make no species-specific distinction (Gur-Arieh et al 2013; Spengler et al 2013; Portillo et al 2017). Application of the above geoarchaeological methods at Shivta allowed characterization of the archaeological deposits, their formation processes (Dunseth et al 2019; Butler et al 2020), and subsequently the origin of the associated archaeobotanical remains
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