Crossing the Borders: New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean

Significance of Wear and Residue Studies / 135
variety of products may have been produced from the palm leaves. The wood from
this palm is now used for constructing floors. The fruit may have been consumed,
as it forms a good source for proteins, oil, and carbohydrates. There are no ethnographic
accounts of present- day consumption by humans. Now birds eat it. Palm
hearts from the Mountain Cabbage are edible and may have been consumed in the
past (Lugo et al. 1998:426).
In a few cases the spheres from the tools seem to have smoothened surfaces.
This may be insignificant, they may simply have a different origin, but this was
not traceable. However, this might also be due to processing. Experiments and the
analysis of larger samples should answer this important question.
Starch was detected on five implements. There seem to be two types of starch.
The smaller round starch grains may well be from Prestoea montana. The elongated
starch grains could be from grass seeds (Fullagar et al. in press), but there are
other candidates, like yam.
The presence of a few starch grains that could originate from grass seeds and
a very low amount of grass phytoliths on the tools is not enough to confirm the
hypothesis that wild grasses were processed at the site. If grasses were processed,
larger numbers of either grass starch or of grass phytoliths should have been found
on the tools. Grasses were present in the area, according to the soil samples, though
not in high numbers. The low percentage of grass phytoliths and high incidence
of nongrass phytoliths, like the spheres, reflects a shaded forest vegetation. It is
argued that little or no wild grasses were processed with the hard stone tools at
this site.
Wear analysis of flaked flint tools revealed that the largest number of tools with
wear traces were used to process siliceous plant (Briels 2004; Van Gijn et al. this
volume). It is not clear whether these were grasses or, possibly, palm leaves. In view
of the results of the present study the latter is suggested. Again, experiments are
needed to further confirm this hypothesis.
Methodology
Finally, wear- trace and residue analysis are complementary methods, which should
be integrated. Both types of analysis require different approaches, which may seem
incompatible. On the one hand, if tools are not clean, wear traces are not detectable.
On the other hand, if tools are cleaned, residues may disappear. To complicate
this, the clean extraction of each type of residue often needs a different chemical
treatment.
Scholars involved in wear- trace and residue studies are well aware of this (e.g.,
Field and Fullagar 1998). The order of analytical steps to be followed is, to a certain
extent, inevitable: residues should be extracted first, after which cleaning for
wear- trace analysis can follow. On relatively clean tools, a stereoscopic microscope
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