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

Plants and Ceramic Griddles / 167
mainly for linguistic reasons, that the documented traditions surrounding this Antillean
plant were a recent acquisition (during the early colonial period), encouraged
by the same process of European colonization in the region.
With regard to legumes, the presence of bean starches in some of the burén
fragments (Figure 12.3b.4) would suggest that these types of seeds could have been
previously pounded or ground in a similar manner as that described for other
plants, that is to say, made into some type of flour or dough. Just as in the Puerto
Rican Taíno sites mentioned before, Fabaceae and bean starches have been documented
in six of the seven analyzed lithic artifacts, which again supports the idea
of pounding and/ or grinding the beans before making the dough that would later
be worked and cooked on the burén fragments studied here. We believe that grinding
and/ or pounding were the only options available to free the flour from the
beans because these seeds are individual, which would make it almost impossible
to grate or rub them over a guayo. In nutritional terms, the possible joint usage of
various foods cannot be discarded since it is known that the nutritional value of
maize increases, for example, when consumed with beans in a synergetic process
that permits one to supplement the deficiencies of the other.
As one can see, this analysis confirms previous conclusions obtained by one of
the authors (Rodríguez Suárez et al. 2001) in chromatographic studies, in which
the burén is shown to be a multipurpose artifact. That is, this large ceramic plate
could have been used as a medium to create an array of nutritional recipes.
As we have pointed out before, in the specific case of the analyzed Macambo II
burén fragment, it was established that it has not been affected by heat exposure
for cooking purposing. Besides it was made with an impure clay with very thick
particles of additives. Thus, its production was crude and fragile. These conditions
suggest that it was probably used by the aborigines of the site more as a support for
the preparation of the nutritional dough than for its cooking. In the same way, the
fact that we found starch grains from different plants in the same fragment suggests
that they were either mixed to prepare some kind of special dough, or this
support was used in multiple occasions to process one of these plants. In the case
of Laguna de Limones, the study of various burén fragments offered better possibilities
to analyze the variety of botanical remains. However, those analyzed fragments
did show evidence of being subjected to heat for food production. Therefore,
it seems worthy to consider the factors that in our opinion influenced the
preservation of the recovered and analyzed vegetable residues at both sites.
On the Preservation of the Grains of Starch on
the Studied Burén Fragments
In one of the cases that concerned us, which, as we have noted is the one in which
the burén fragment has not been heated (from Macambo II), it would not be diffi-
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