Elusive wild foods in South East Asian subsistence: Modern ethnography and archaeological phytoliths Alison Weisskopf Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31-34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H0PY, United Kingdom article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Subsistence Archaeobotany Ethnobotany Wild foods Economic plants Phytoliths abstract A common predicament in archaeobotany is the relatively low proportion of the plant material exploited by humans that survives into the archaeobotanical record. Ethnobotanical survey can provide insights on how people utilized and disposed of their local plant resources and this can feed back into in- terpretations of archaeological evidence. Here ethnobotanic data from different regions of Thailand are employed to better understand the exploitation of gathered and garden economic plants in the context of traditional village systems where there is often a blurred line between the wild and the domestic and no clear division between the garden and the forest. This information is used in turn, to understand archaeobotanical results from Rach Nui, a Neolithic settled non-agricultural site in Vietnam, and Non Ban Jak, an Iron Age site with a rice farming economy in Northeast Thailand. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction 1.1. Background and aims While there is a continuing debate on the nature of the tran- sition from foraging to farming, particularly rice farming, in mainland South East Asia, (Higham, 1995; White, 1989; Bellwood, 2005; Harris and Hillman, 2014; Higham and Rispoli, 2014), it is almost certain that gathered plants were utilised before, during and after the introduction of agriculture, and are still used today. In China there is archaeobotanical evidence for the exploitation of wild foods long after people started cultivating and then domes- ticating rice, for example at Tianluoshan in the Lower Yangtze (Fuller et al., 2009; Fuller et al., 2011) and in the Ying Valley (Fuller and Zhang, 2007). However, even more than other branches of archaeology, archaeobotany is limited by preservation (Miksciek, 1987; Fairbairn, 2005; Fuller, 2007). The vast majority of archae- ological floral macro-remains come from charring, which favours robust items like small seeds, chaff or nutshell, while large fruit and edible leaves, for example, are unlikely to survive (Fairbairn, 2005). More mesic environments or those with a wet and dry cycle, such as those frequently found in the humid tropics, often produce low quantities of charred remains due to soil formation processes and poor preservation (Miksciek, 1987; Hather, 1994). One approach is to explore archaeobotanical datasets from mate- rials that preserve differently such as starches (Barton and Paz, 2007; Piperno, 2012; Barton, 2012) or phytoliths (Kealhofer and Piperno, 1994, 1998; Piperno, 2009). Silica bodies are inorganic so are not subject to the same patterns of deterioration as organic material. Distinct phytolith morphotypes are produced in different plant parts, including leaves, so can provide additional information to charred botanical remains (Piperno, 1989; Prychid et al., 2004). Two major questions are posed in this paper: i. What proportion of gathered and garden cultivated plant re- mains could survive into the archaeobotanical record? ii. Is this reflected in the archaeobotanical remains from the different sites? To answer the first question information was derived from ethnobotanic surveys of gathered plants including wild, feral, field weeds, and those cultivated in gardens in four villages in Thailand. Which plant part was gathered, how it was prepared, consumed and any remains were disposed of, was recorded. Plants were recorded to species, genera or family where possible and the way the plant was exploited was categorised (Table 1). For the second question phytolith assemblages were analysed E-mail address: a.weisskopf@ucl.ac.uk. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.09.028 1040-6182/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Quaternary International xxx (2016) 1e11 Please cite this article in press as: Weisskopf, A., Elusive wild foods in South East Asian subsistence: Modern ethnography and archaeological phytoliths, Quaternary International (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2016.09.028