Put down roots and find the plant!: preliminary results of root etching and its implications

ABSTRACT

Vegetation provides direct information to interpret the environment, ecology, climate and deposit of a site. The identification of the surrounding vegetation from root marks recorded on the surface of skeletal elements is a new source of information of special interest. This article is a preliminary approach to relate root marking (i.e. taphonomic effect) recorded on bone surfaces caused by plants (i.e. taphonomic agent) through an experimental model. Distinguishing the root marks of one type of plant from marks produced by any other type of plant is an investigation that has been neglected in taphonomy. The preliminary results described here represent the starting point of this research field. This is an experimental work that is currently in progress, and further studies will include higher sample sizes and the analysis of different specimens in contact with other plants such as shrubs and trees. Our preliminary results shown here come from three different root plant types (underground, subaerial and aquatic) displaying characteristic differences that reinforce the need of extending this research and the importance of the analysis of this taphonomic modification.

KEYWORDS:

• Taphonomy
• palaeoecology
• forensic anthropology
• burial environments
• open-air sites
• aquatic settings

Acknowledgments

The authors are especially grateful to the staff from the Experimental Field Station of La Higueruela (Carlos Lacasta, Jose Ramón Vadillo, Jose María Gómez, Marta Fernández, Jose Romero and Sergio San Segundo) for their invaluable advice and assistance to settle and survey these experiments, as well as to collect the specimens. We are also grateful to the staff of the Scanning Electron Microscope Unit of the MNCN-CSIC (Laura Tormo and Marta Furió) for their professional work. These experiments are part of a recently initiated PhD Thesis by Alba Macho-Callejo under the supervision of Y. Fernández-Jalvo. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Historical Biology, whose comments and suggestions have greatly improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This experimental work was supported by the projects CGL2010-19825 and CGL2022_PID2021-126933NB-I00 from the National Research Program funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation. AMC has a “Programa Investigo” project of the Regional Community of Madrid and the LeaT-MNCN-CSIC. AG has a postdoctoral Margarita Salas Grant - Next Generation EU (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and MNCN-CSIC). SGM has a predoctoral grant UCM-Banco Santander (CT42/18-CT43/18). DMM has a CONICET postdoctoral grant [RESOL-2020-134-APN-DIR#CONICET].