Plants are fundamental to life; they are used by all human groups and
most animals. They provide raw materials, vitamins and essential
nutrients and we could not survive without them. Yet access to plant use
before the Neolithic can be challenging. In some places, plant remains
rarely survive and reconstructing plant use in pre-agrarian contexts
needs to be conducted using a range of different techniques. This lack
of visible evidence has led to plants being undervalued, both in terms
of their contribution to diet and as raw materials. This book outlines
why the role of plants is required for a better understanding of hominin
and pre-agrarian human life, and it offers a variety of ways in which
this can be achieved.
Wild Harvest is divided into three sections. In section 1 each chapter
focuses on a specific feature of plant use by humans; this covers the
role of carbohydrates, the need for and effects of processing methods,
the role of plants in self-medication among apes, plants as raw
materials, and the extent of evidence for plant use prior to the
development of agriculture in the Near East. Section 2 comprises seven
chapters which cover different methods available to obtain information
on plants, and the third section has five chapters, each covering a
topic related to ethnography, ethnohistory, or ethnoarchaeology, and how
these can be used to improve our understanding of the role of plants in
the pre-agrarian past.
