Abstract
In spite of their importance as a crop today, records of the use of wild banana and the antecedents of the modern domesticated bananas are relatively obscure. Banana dispersal pattern from their native range (e.g. Island South East Asia and New Guinea) is also poorly known. Excavation at Fahien Rockshelter in South Western Sri Lanka yielded phytolith sequence dating from 48,354 to 3900 cal BP. Phytolith evidence suggests that Rockshelter occupants used wild banana (Musa. acuminata and M. balbisiana) through the late Pleistocene to early Holocene, i.e. 8000 cal BP. After this age, occupants significantly decreased the use of wild bananas.
Highlights
The island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean has evidence of the prehistoric settlements from several Rock shelter sites dating from 36,000cal BP onwards, and one terminal Pleistocene sits yielded a few evidence of wild Musa banana used as one of the starchy food in prehistoric life [24,25], but no conclusive evidence has been presented for understanding the prehistory of wild Musa banana in their native region
Banana (Musa spp.) phytoliths from seeds and leaves are present throughout the late Pleistocene-Holocene stratigraphy
Substantial quantities of burned phytoliths in the late Pleistocene are indicative of frequent fire
Summary
This publication reports the very early occurrence of the phytoliths of wild bananas from the late Quaternary archaeological sequence (48,354 -3900cal BP) at Fahien Rock shelter (Figure 1). BP [24,25,26,27,28,29,30], and these works identified 6 major layers with approximately 250 archaeological contexts. These were grouped into 8 archaeological phases (Figure 2). Eleven 30x10x8cm monoliths were taken from the southern profile of Fahien Rockshelter excavation Area From these monoliths, seventeen subsamples were selected for phytolith analysis.
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