Charring-induced morphological changes of Chinese “Five Grains”: An experimental study

Abstract

Introduction Charring process affects the preservation potential of seeds, resulting in limited perceptions of crop assemblages recovered from archaeological layers. Therefore, the specifics of the charring process deserve further investigation. Colloquially referred to as the “Five Grains” (五谷), bread wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), foxtail millet ( Setaria italica ), broomcorn millet ( Panicum miliaceum ), rice ( Oryza sativa ), and soybean ( Glycine max ) represent a set of four major cultivated cereals and a pulse constituting crucial staple food in Chinese history and the most frequently discovered crops at archaeological sites in China Methods This paper aims to understand the changes in size, volume, and weight loss of grains under variable aerobic charring conditions. The size and wei