Foraging Spontaneous Seeds for Neolithic Bread

Описание: Grass bread from 5500-4500 years ago?

Since already decades I’ve been hypnotised by this grass and presuming it was once consumed. It just always looked as food to me:) And indeed, it’s food. Or rather, it WAS food. It served for the Neolithic bread.

It’s everywhere… This grass is so common. And it fed millions in the past. It is native to Eurasia and Africa, Levant area included - the latter is especially important in the food anthropology and history.

In microscope the seed has plenty of endosperm, packed with shiny white starch coated with brownish skin. That starch itself was the reason for which people consumed also this species (and genus) in the prehistory. I am now extracting the seeds to make a flatbread.

Polish archaeobotanist says: „For producing flour and groats plant species with large and starch-rich fruits, namely grasses (Poaceae) were used. Their caryopses contain considerable amounts of starch, as well as carbohydrates, proteins and fats.” (M. Lityńska-Zając & oth., 2017).

Ths grass’ starch is in the group that has „spherical, sub-spherical, ellipsoid, pyriform, reniform or ovoid starch without MLCF, without visible lamellae, and with a centric, refractive hilum.” (Hadar Ahituv, Amanda G. Henry, 2022).

„Starch grains preserved in dental calculus and on stone tools have been recovered from archaeological material from sites around the world. However, the ability to identify archaeological starch grains relies on having a broad (i.e., many taxa) and deep (i.e., many individuals from the same taxon) reference collection from modern plants. Only a small handful of such reference collections have been published.” (ib.).

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