Alston V. Thoms

AIRBORNE STARCH GRANULES AS A POTENTIAL CONTAMINATION SOURCE AT ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES

Abstract Well-known allergy literature attests to a presence of airborne starch granules from human and natural activities and illustrates that starch granules within pollen grains from starch-rich plants are released when pollen grains rupture in mid-air during thunderstorms. This study reports on starch granules extracted from Texas air samples and ruptured pollen grains from seven ethnographically important geophyte species, as well as maize (Zea mays L.). Starch granules from pollen grains are compared to those in storage organs of these plants. Results confirm that storage-like starch granules are airborne and that starch granules inside pollen can be indistinguishable from starch granules in the respective storage organs.

Ancient Savannah Roots of the Carbohydrate Revolution in South-Central North America

Abstract Along the ecotone between North America’s southern Plains and southeast Woodlands, the oldest known earth ovens with rock heating elements date to 8,000–9,000 years ago. Through the millennia, the number and diversity of earth ovens increased markedly, but they typically functioned as plant-baking facilities, especially for geophytes, plants with underground storage organs. Among the important early Holocene geophytes in oak savannah regions were onions (Allium spp.) and camas (Camassia spp.). In the drier savannahs, including Texas’ Edwards Plateau, agave (Agave lechuguilla) and sotol (Dasylirion spp.), plants with above-ground storage organs, dominated oven cookery. Rock-filled earth ovens were common in comparatively wet regions with sandy soils, including Texas’ Post Oak Savannah, but floral preservation conditions are poor. Ethnobotanically and ecologically derived expectations, however, suggest false garlic (Northoscordum bivalve), onions, and spring beauty (Claytonia virginica) as potential plant food staples. Various plant foods were undoubtedly eaten throughout the pre-Columbian era but geophytes appear to have sparked and sustained an ancient carbohydrate revolution that led to significant early Holocene land-use intensification. Such a profound dietary shift may yet be shown to have played an important role in changes in Native American cranial morphology during the early Holocene.

The first occurrence of a toxodont (Mammalia, Notoungulata) in the United States

This is the publishers version, also available electronically from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2012.711405#.U1qJK4UvDGJ.

Sand Blows Desperately: Land-Use History and Site Integrity at Camp Ford, a Confederate POW Camp in East Texas

Archaeological investigations revealed well-preserved remains of Camp Ford (41SM181), an East Texas Civil War site where Confederate guards held up to 4,800 Union prisoners of war (POWs) in a stockaded compound on a sandy hillside. The prisoners brought tons of clayey sediment onto the site’s loamy sand soil for construction of houses and as backdirt from refuse pits. Abandoned at war’s end and probably salvaged for useable logs, Camp Ford became farmland, ultimately a pine-tree farm. Among identified subsurface features were stockade-wall trenches, refuse pits, dugouts, and clay-lined cabin floors. Trenches and pits in the sandy solum typically exhibited remarkably abrupt boundaries with the surrounding subsoil, in contrast to markedly less distinctive feature boundaries encountered at most sandy-landform sites in the region. Good preservation conditions resulted in large measure from postwar development of a clay-rich B horizon (Bt) and lamellae (thin clayey bands), which retarded eluviation in the underlying 2Eb horizon and thereby preserved feature boundaries.

Ethnographies and Actualistic Cooking Experiments: Ethnoarchaeological Pathways toward Understanding Earth-Oven Variability in Archaeological Records

ABSTRACT This article addresses aspects of earth-oven baking, as reported in ethnohistoric and ethnographic accounts from western North America and via a series of actualistic experiments. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts attest to far more variability in oven morphologies, baking times, and food types than has been identified archaeologically. Toward mitigation of this data-discrepancy, we present methods and results of building and using nine earth ovens representative of those known ethnographically and expected to be represented in archaeological records. Our experiments demonstrate that earth-oven baking in a morphological variety of facilities is readily replicated by drawing from the ethnographic and ethnohistoric literature. Successful strategies are quickly learned through trial and error. With that comes an adequate understanding of how heat energy flows in various facilities along with recognition of critical roles of temperature, moisture availability, and cooking time, thereby providing a basis for better understanding the nature of related archaeological records.