Supplementary Image Collection for "Phytolith Presence in Chenopodium album: the potentials for studying bathua in archaeological studies." Bates et al.

This is the supplementary image collection stored in in repository for the paper under submission. It will be made available when paper is published also.Supplementary image collection for paper. Paper abstract: Chenopodium album is a globally ubiquitous plant that is at once a weed, food and fodder, placing it as an important taxa for many archaeological and paleoenvironmental studies. While the prolific seeds it produces survive well in most archaeological contexts, the vegetative tissues do not, and these tissues could provide critical missing information about the latter two roles it may have played in the past – food and fodder. Microbotanical remains, specifically phytoliths, might be able to provide evidence for this, but C.album is reported to produce few to no silica phytoliths. This paper proposes instead that looking to calcium oxalate phytoliths may be of use in archaeological studies, and reviews the C.album phytolith literature relating to this, as well as outlining modern plant studies to see what calcium oxalate phytoliths, and silica phytoliths, it produces. The results suggest that C.album is a prolific calcium oxalate phytolith producer, and combined with macrobotanical presence of this taxa at sites may be useful for thinking about vegetative tissue use in controlled contextual settings.Our thanks go to Professor Katherine Moore for not only not weeding out but even nurturing the Chenopodium album in her garden this year and providing it to us for the experiment. Also the owner of the patch of land on Baltimore Avenue who let us take a Chenopodium album plant but did not want to be named in the paper. We are grateful to both of them for providing materials to work with. G. Bates provided insight into plant reference collection method making and we are thankful for her advice on this. We are also grateful to the Penn Paleoecology Lab and University of Pennsylvania Department of Archaeology and Anthropology for allowing us to carry out the experimental extractions and the analysis in their work space. Images of the samples were taken using the Keyence VHX7000