New Ideas about the Origin of Agriculture Based on 50 Years of Museum‐Curated Plant Remains

COMMITMENT to the perpetual storage and curation of archaeA ological plant remains was not commonplace in American museums of anthropology until quite recently. The historical bias against maintaining archaeological plant specimens undoubtedly derives from two sources.' First, museums have been accustomed to preserve obvious artifacts of human manufacture. These antiquities were regarded as cultural whereas animal bones and vegetable fragments and charcoal were considered environmental or subsistence evidence. Today, of course, these organic remains are recognized as products of human cultural behavior, because every culture classifies its biological world and selectively hunts or gathers from a range of possibilities. Thus these biological discards are evidence of past cultural principles guiding human extraction from nature. Furthermore, some of these remains are actually artifacts; that is, they represent plants and animals whose genetic composition or natural distribution was so altered by human selection and behavior that they could not survive in place or would not exist at all if i t were not for human maintenance. Second, these plant remains are so fragile and heterogeneous in composition that many museums were, and continue to be, ill-prepared for their permanent curation. In both cases, theoretical predilection and benign neglect have led to incalculable loss of irreplaceable research data. Archaeological plant remains are indispensible to many problems of anthropological significance. They are evidence of past natural en-