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Samples of plant remains from two sites, Berry (31BK22) and McDowell (31MC41), were submitted to the Paleoethnobotany Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for analysis. Only ®otation samples are reported upon here, although some material recovered from the McDowell site by water screening during 1977 excavations was also examined. The sample from Berry is considerably larger than that from McDowell, which constrains the comparisons that can be made of plant remains assemblages from the sites. Both sites date to the middle to late¤fteenth century, although McDowell appears to contain an earlier, twelfthcentury component as well. When additional plant remains from these two sites are examined it should be possible to draw some conclusions about how subsistence patterns in the Catawba valley on the eve of European contact differed from earlier patterns. Viewed together, plant remains data from the two sites provide a basis for preliminary discussion of the use of plant foods by late prehistoric occupants of the western North Carolina Piedmont. Materials and Methods All of the samples from McDowell were analyzed. These included one from mound ¤ll and ¤ve from features, representing a total of 60 liters of ¤ll. The ®otation samples selected from Berry were collected from 11 features, including three burials. The total assemblage represents 265 liters of ¤ll. Although not all samples submitted were analyzed, an attempt was made to represent all zones and features by at least one sample with subsamples re®ecting the total amount of material submitted for each feature. Flotation samples were processed in the ¤eld using a modi¤ed SMAPtype water separation device (Watson 1976). A .7-mm mesh brass sieve was used to collect light fractions, and heavy fractions were recovered in 6-in (approximately 1.6 mm) window screen. Some heavy fractions were further separated by the analyst in the laboratory using tap water and a Appendix E Report on Plant Remains from the Berry and McDowell Sites Kristen J. Gremillion plastic tub to pour off charcoal that had settled initially into the heavy fraction tub during ¤eld processing. This was done only for samples that contained large quantities of soil, pottery, and/or stone that would have rendered hand sorting of the entire sample too time consuming. Material remaining in the 2.0-mm and larger screens was sorted completely and each component was weighed. Material passing through the 2.0-mm screen was searched only for seeds, cultigen remains, and items not found in the larger size category. Quantities of plant remains in the .7-mm and larger size category were estimated on the basis of their representation in the greater than 2.0 mm size category. This procedure assumes equal representation of various materials in all size classes. Although this assumption is sometimes not justi¤ed, the extrapolation provides a more accurate estimate of actual quantities in each sample than do the raw data. For each site, extrapolated quantities of plant remains are presented as well as itemizations of plant food remains (Table 51 lists the scienti¤c names of plants mentioned in the text). Seeds and fruits appear as aggregate weights for each sample in the tables, but counts are given separately. Percentages of identi¤ed seeds were calculated using only seeds identi¤ed to genus or species level. Ubiquity values were also calculated for plant food remains at each site. Here, ubiquity represents the percentage of features from which an item was recovered and re®ects the regularity of occurrence rather than quantity. This procedure eliminates some of the biases inherent in calculation of percentages by weight, which tend to exaggerate the importance of plant foods that produce dense, durable remains, such as hickory shell. Results McDowell Site In addition to large amounts of wood charcoal, smaller quantities of giant cane stem were recovered from Feature 7. Several fragments of an unidenti ¤ed root or tuber occurred in Feature 6 (Table 52). Among plant food remains, hickory and acorn shell and maize cupules and kernels were abundant. Fragments of common bean cotyledon were found in the mound¤ll sample (Table 53). A small number of seeds were recovered from the site as well (Table 54). Most of the latter are of common weeds (e.g., nightshade , plantain (?), morning glory, spurge, chenopod, ragweed, maypops, and lespedeza (?) [see below for a discussion of tentative identi¤cations of plantain and lespedeza at the Berry site]). Maypops was probably a food plant, and although the seeds of chenopod and ragweed may have...

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