Abstract
All modern domesticated sunflowers can be traced to a single center of domestication in the interior mid-latitudes of eastern North America. The sunflower achenes and kernels recovered from six eastern North American sites predating 3000 b.p. that document the early history of this important crop plant are reanalyzed, and two major difficulties in the interpretation of archaeological sunflower specimens are addressed. First, achenes and kernels obtained from a modern wild sunflower population included in a prior genetic study because of its minimal likelihood for crop-wild gene flow, and its close genetic relationship to domesticated sunflowers, provide a new and more tightly drawn basis of comparison for distinguishing between wild and domesticated achene and kernel specimens recovered from archaeological contexts. Second, achenes and kernels from this modern wild baseline population were carbonized, allowing a direct comparison between carbonized archaeological specimens and a carbonized modern wild reference class, thereby avoiding the need for the various problematic shrinkage correction conversion formulas that have been employed over the past half century. The need for further research on museum collections is underscored, and new research directions are identified.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Nolan Kane and Eric Baack for all their help in providing sunflower disks from the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge in western Iowa. I am very grateful to Mary C. Suter, Curator of Collections of the University of Arkansas Museum Collections, for her help in facilitating my research on the Marble Bluff sunflower assemblage. I also want to thank Nancy Asch Sidell for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article. David Asch and Nancy Asch Sidell were also very generous in providing me with their recent report that documents Helianthus material from west-central Illinois: [Asch and Asch Sidell (2012) Images and measurements of Archaic Helianthus achenes and kernels from west–central Illinois. Cent Am Archeol, Archeobot Lab Rep 83], and for permission to reproduce images of specimens from Napoleon Hollow and Koster. Thanks also to Gary Crites, who provided information regarding the Hayes site sunflower specimens, as well as permission to reproduce the photograph of a Hayes site specimen.
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Smith, B.D. The domestication of Helianthus annuus L. (sunflower). Veget Hist Archaeobot 23, 57–74 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-013-0393-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-013-0393-3