7th Meeting of the Society of Kansai Jomon Culture Studies

On December 9-10th, the meeting of the Society of Kansai Jomon Culture Studies was conducted at Osaka City University.

The research theme was " Living and environment for Jomon people in Kansai area". During the both days, many researchers present recent research results.

The topics of those presentations were archaeological animal remains largely, but some of them were archaeobotanical remains. Also, the debating session was conducted under the main theme "how archaeologists can reconstruct past plant foods (=gathering), fishing, hunting, stone tool composition by evidences found from archaeological sites?".

This meeting began the poster session, and I present my poster.

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In July 2006, I described "we started starch analysis of charred remains on potsherds".

Residue extraction: potsherds

I present this result for the first time.

Starch analysis of charred residues on pots from the Miyake-Nishi site in Matsubara City.

I conducted starch analysis of charred residues on postsherds (the middle of Late Jomon) found from the Miyake-Nishi site in Matusbara City, Osaka.

The most of potsherds were not affected by any rollings and those charred remains were very thick: the preserved conditions are relatively well. These shows the characteristics of Kitashirakawa-Joso style III (a typical Late Jomon style). This time, I took samples from 12 postsherds.

As the result, I found ancient starch granules from all analysed potsherds.

Many decayed and gelatinised starch granules are contained, but morphotypes of intact granules can be separated into round, oval and angular. Those diameters are from 6-20 μm.

Moreover, I found clumped granules and granules into plant tissues. The photos are granules into plant tissues. Those two photos are taken by polarized-light microscope: no-polarized (above) and polarized (below).

(Magnification x100, scale bar 50 μm)

....The identifications would provide interests to many researchers. But these starch granules contains lots of degraded ones, and the candidate species through any scientific reconstductions are not sure yet: thus, I cannot say "this starch is from A plant".

HOWEVER

These starch are NOT either taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott), hazelnut (Corylus heterophylla Fisch. var. thunbergii Blume), whose starch granules are very tiny, higan-bana (red spider lily in Japanese, Lycoris radiata var. radiata), or yam (Dioscorea japonica).

I present this result as a poster, and I would write a paper/report about recent research results soon.