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9 Plant Remains from the Rhoads Site (11Lo8), Illinois Leonard W. Blake and Hugh C. Cutler Missouri Botanical Garden (Written in 1974) Leonard Blake’s Comments, 1999 The Rhoads site, in Logan County, Illinois, was excavated by an archaeologist employed by the Illinois State Museum, as an archaeological salvage project, made necessary by the needs of the Illinois Department of Transportation. Our report was to be an appendix to a final report by the museum’s archaeologist. We received some information about the history of the site, some data from the field notes, and all plant remains recovered. I wrote this report and turned it in to the Illinois State Museum, but no publication followed. I believe that information in this report is still valid and not outdated, although form of presentation and emphasis might not be identical today. Plants from archaeological sites can provide valuable information on the lives of past inhabitants. The kinds of wild plants indicate what portions of a region were exploited most thoroughly and sometimes suggest the time of year when the site was occupied. Cultivated plants are especially useful. Sometimes they can indicate the degree of sophistication of plant selection and agricultural techniques, and by comparisons of the kinds of plants grown with those of their neighbors, provide a measure of the amount of cultural interchange. The Rhoads site is important because it lies in a region that was undergoing great change during the site’s period of occupation. Corn was becoming more important for food, and as a medium of exchange. New kinds of corn and other plants were introduced by waves of people moving into or through the region.ThecarefullycontrolledexcavationoftheRhoadssiterecoveredenough specimens, most of them preserved by carbonization, so that a series of studies and comparisons could be made in addition to simple identification. Some form of flotation, as defined by Struever (1968), or the more rapid but sometimes more destructive method called “water screening,” is becoming standard practice in American archaeology. Water screening usually consists of placing excavated dirt on a screen, or screens, and squirting it with a hose. From light soils recovery may be good and damage minimal, but with heavy clays, or gumbo, fragmentation may be great. Flotation usually produces more undamaged,orlightlydamaged,carbonizedplantmaterial.Eitheroneisagreat step forward over the practices of just a few years ago when recovery of this class of remains was sporadic and unorganized. The extent of recovery of fragile, carbonized, botanical material may vary widely because of chance differences in abundance, and because of differences in the proportions of excavated dirt processed. The methods used and the degree of care and understanding of the individual excavator and processor are also factors. Preservation of any archaeological remains is by chance, to some extent, and the odds for charring, usually necessary for the preservation of plant remains in a humid climate, are even less. Some remains are more likely to become charred than others. For example, ethnological accounts indicate that corn was often parched (Kinietz 1965:175; Waugh 1916:88). This would appear to increase chances that corn would become overparched, that is, carbonized, more than other kinds of plant foods that were processed by other methods, such as boiling. The use of corn cobs for fuel or smudges could be expected to increase the frequency, and consequently the recovery, of carbonized cobs. The hard parts of carbonized corn cobs are nearly indestructible, as are some nut shells, plum stones, etc., but seeds of beans and squash are extremely fragile when carbonized, and so may be underrepresented, even when the most careful procedures are followed. Hackberry trees grow on disturbed soil. People have sucked the sweet pulp from the outsides of the seeds since the days of Peking Man (Coon 1962:431), but who can say which seed found on an archaeological site was savored by an Indian, and which fell off a tree growing on a midden deposit. Animals and birds too like to eat some of the same things that people do. The presence in quantity or in many parts of a habitation site of such things as plum pits or pawpaw seeds probably means that people had been eating the fruit, but an occasional occurrence might be incidental burning. These matters indicate a need for caution in viewing statistical results from analysis of carbonized plant remains from archaeological sites. On the positive side, plant remains can provide several kinds of information . As more collections are available, and techniques are improved, their usefulness...

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