Starch Granules, Dental Calculus and New Perspectives on Ancient Diet
By K. Hardy, T. Blakeney, L. Copeland, J. Kirkham, R. Wrangham, Matthew J. Collins. 2009
169 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recent work in various parts of the world has suggested the possibility of ancient starch granules surviving and adhering to archaeological artefacts. Often this information is used to infer aspects of diet. One additional source for recovery of archaeological starch granules is dental calculus. The presence of plant food debris in dental calculus is well known but has not been not widely investigated using archaeological material. The extraction of starch granules from dental calculus represents a direct link to the consumption of starchy food by humans or animals. Using dental calculus also sidesteps many other questions still inherent in using starch granules to reconstruct aspects of ancient diet, such as the effects of diagenesis on their morphology; as the starches are trapped inside a concreted matrix they are less likely to alter over time. We used amylase digestion by a starch-specific enzyme to confirm the material as starch.
Subfields: Ecology, Geography, Planning and Development, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a41e12ffa3860c4f51c9c6f05f6cd63bf296def3
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Citations in the corpus
- Evaluating microfossil content of dental calculus from Brazilian sambaquis (2010, methodology): “It is less likely that diagenesis affected the starch (Hardy et al., 2009).”
- New insights into the consumption of maize and other food plants in the pre-Columbian Caribbean from starch grains trapped in human dental calculus (2012, background): “…of the extraction technique2 did not improve the retrieval rate, and as the method we have used is comparable to those used in other studies (i.e., Hardy et al., 2009; Henry and Piperno, 2008), we feel that the lower retrieval rate is most likely the result of poor preservation of the material…”
- Dental calculus reveals potential respiratory irritants and ingestion of essential plant-based nutrients at Lower Palaeolithic Qesem Cave Israel (2016, unknown): “Additional laboratory procedures to avoid contamination of modern and ancient origin followed established methods fully described elsewhere (Hardy et al., 2009; Warinner et al., 2014).”