phytoliths

The botanical material included phytoliths, endocarps and fossilized wood.

Ardipithecus ramidus: The Geological, Environmental, and Taphonomic Background - The Panda's Thumb

For example, Flip could talk about phytoliths, or Stringy could talk about obsidian, and what their finds can tell us.

Archive 2007-08-01

But when wheat is grown under dry farming conditions, the phytoliths usually consist of single cells or small clusters.

The Goddess and the Bull

The previous year Arlene Rosen, an expert in the analysis of phytoliths—tiny fossil plants that are ubiquitous in an ancient site like Çatalhöyük—had also joined the team.

The Goddess and the Bull

We've also started taking samples from each layer in hopes of recovering pollen and phytoliths to help determine the vegetation that was in and around the distillery building.

Interactive Dig Mt. Vernon - Dig Diaries: Report 8

In the near future, archaeobotanist Ahmed Fahmy intends to analyze the residue for starches and phytoliths, microscopic silica skeletons of plant cells that are unique in form to specific plants.

Interactive Dig Hierakonpolis - Hierakonpolis 2007 - Field Note 1

The abundance of phytoliths, silica structures found in plants, and the amount of cultural material (as measured by weight) followed a similar pattern: a drop-off after the Clovis-era deposit that corresponds to the sterile sand level, followed by a small peak corresponding to the lower cultural level.

Cactus Hill Update

But search locations shifted when molecular biologists began to study where the ancestor of maize, teosinte, grows today and when researchers began using phytoliths and starch grains to identify maize and other plant species, both domesticated and wild, in the 1990s.

Media Newswire

Arlene’s analysis of the wheat and barley phytoliths showed that they came from plants that had been dry-farmed, but the nearest land available for dry farming during most of the Neolithic occupation at Çatalhöyük was about seven miles away from the site.

The Goddess and the Bull

Yet that scenario was contradicted by the work of Arlene Rosen of the Institute of Archaeology in London, an expert in the analysis of phytoliths—tiny fossil plant remains that are formed when silica, which enters plants from the soil, is deposited within the cells of a plant’s outer epidermal tissues.

The Goddess and the Bull