Starch grains from dental calculus reveal ancient plant foodstuffs at Chenqimogou site, Gansu Province

Starch grain analysis of human dental calculus to investigate Neolithic consumption of plants in the middle Yellow River Valley, China: A case study on Gouwan site

“…Starch grains from domesticated wheat (Triticum aestivum) and barley (Hordeum vulgare) were extracted from human calculus at Chenqimogou site dated to around 4000 BP in northwest China (Li et al, 2010). Ge (2010a) extracted heated Triticeae starch grains by the presence of gelatinization from calculus of domesticated pigs at Duzhong site dated to the late Yangshao period in Henan Province.…”

“…Here we consulted the methods of extracting starch grains from human dental calculus used by Piperno and Dillehay (2008) and Li et al (2010). First, the calculus was ground in a mortar and pestle.…”

Early millet use in West Liaohe area during early-middle Holocene

“…The identification of the starch grains was based on one-on-one comparisons of the ancient starches with those from over 200 Asian species housed in modern reference collections, including 50 genera in the families of Poaceae, Leguminosae, Fagaceae, published images and data (Yang et al, 2009a(Yang et al, , 2009bLi et al, 2010;Wan et al, 2012b;Yang and Perry, 2013). Starch grain identification was also based on a previous classification of millet crops that included morphological and statistical analyses of the starch grains from millets that had been shelled and ground in a simulation experiment (Ma, 2014).…”

Subsistence and the isotopic signature of herding in the Bronze Age Hexi Corridor, NW Gansu, China

“…Barton et al, 2009;Li et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2010;Pechenkina et al, 2002Pechenkina et al, , 2005. Palaeodietary work using stable isotopes shows millet to feature heavily in the diets of humans and domestic fauna in the Yellow and Wei River valleys of Gansu and Shaanxi Provinces, during the late Neolithic and Bronze Age (Barton et al, 2009;Pechenkina et al, 2005).…”