Abstract
Increasingly, archeologists are realizing that early agriculturalists manipulated suites of plant species as they contended with environmental instability and cultural performance. Studying these complex interactions requires robust diagnostic indicators for each species. This has been particularly difficult for millet macrobotanical remains in Asia. Microbotanical remains, such as phytoliths, offer a possible alternative for millet identification. To date, work on Setaria phytoliths has focused on a restricted number of species, limiting the confidence of identifying domesticated Setaria. Here we present the results of morphometric analysis of both leaf and inflorescence morphology across 12 of the 14 species of Setaria found in China today. Results suggest that robust discrimination of Setaria italica requires measurements of two types of inflorescence bract cells.
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