Argumentation of agriculture in archaeological sites of Priamurye and Primorye: results of palaeobotanical method application

The spread of agriculture to the south of the Russian Far East from the core region (Northern China) has been proved by the ar-chaeobotanical data for the Zaisanovka Late Neolithic culture only. There is no doubt that we need to continue further search of direct evidence of agriculture, its dissemination and composition of cultural plants for other archaeological cultures in the region. But the lack of archaeobotanists in Russia seriously limits such studies. This article focuses attention on the three archaeobotanical methods tested on the archaeological sites in the Primorye and the Amur River region for detecting crop remains and simultaneously minimizing effort for this. We compared capabilities and effectiveness of carpological, pollen and phytolith analysis for finding plant remains in two settlements near the Osinovoye Lake (Priamurye) and the Risovaya-4 site (Primorye). Carpological analysis showed high effectiveness. Identified seeds of farming plants were found in deposits of two sites. We received new data confirming the existence of a crop complex with two millet species (Panicum miliaceum, Setaria italica), naked barley (Hordeum vulgare var. nudum) and, possibly, soft wheat (Triticum aestivum) in the early Middle Ages of the West Amur River region. Broomcorn and foxtail millet seeds from Risovaya-4 cannot be definitely attributed to the Middle Neolithic layer of this multilayer site. Apparently, they must be correlated with the Late Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. Effectiveness of pollen and phytolith analysis was significantly lower. Some pollen similar to foxtail millet was found only on the Risovaya-4 site. The obtained result is not convincing, because only little pollen was found. However, this finding demonstrates a possibility to determine the pollen of cultivated millet in the archaeological layers of the Russian Far East, one of the areas of millet agriculture. Despite the abundance of forests around the ancient settlements, pollen data does not reveal the large-scale deforestation and pollen of segetal weeds. Thus, the farming fields were not large or were localized at a long distance from the sites. A small amount of phytoliths, morphologically similar to cultivated grains, were found on all sites. But only in one case (in the medieval settlement on the Osinovoye Lake) phytoliths belonging to cultural millet were identified. Identification of most of other phytoliths as cultivated millet species was complicated in most cases, because of the small number of detected forms and similar diagnostic features between phytoliths of broomcorn and foxtail millet. An important condition for a successful search of carpoids and phytoliths of cultivated plants is numerous and oriented sampling in relevant archaeological contexts. The quality of preservation and abundance of pollen in the soil are serious limiting factors for searching of agriculture traces with this method in the Russian Far East archaeological sites.

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