Starch taphonomy, equifinality and the importance of context: Some notes on the identification of food processing through starch grain analysis

The analysis of starch grains from food-related archaeological artefacts and human dental calculus has provided evidence for the consumption of plant resources worldwide. Recently, and based on experimental research, starch grain analysis has also been used as a proxy to reconstruct food transformation in the archaeological record through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains by different food-processing techniques such as grinding, boiling and fermentation. The prospect of identifying food transformation through starch grain analysis opens exciting avenues for exploring the cultural factors underlying culinary practices. However, the structural integrity of starch grains may be affected by a variety of depositional and post-depositional processes, including but not limited to food processing, so that in order to identify damage produced by food processing one would first need to discard potential damage occurred at later stages (e.g., in the burial environment, during laboratory processing and analysis, etc.). The identification of food processing through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains is further obscured by equifinality and multifinality, as exemplified by uncooked modern reference material presented here showing damage patterns consistent with “boiling”, “spouting” and “fermenting”. Consequently, the identification of food transformation in the archaeological record through the analysis of the damage produced on starch grains needs to be supported by reliable contextual information, a representative number of samples and the existence of alternative sources of evidence (i.e., a multi-proxy approach).This work was supported by the European Commission (H2020 MSCA 2015; Grant No. 704867) and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Juan de la Cierva Incorporación 2018 Programme).Peer reviewe