Elusive wild foods in South East Asian subsistence: Modern ethnography and archaeological phytoliths

A common predicament in archaeobotany is the relatively low proportion of the plant material exploited by humans that survives into the archaeobotanical record. Ethnobotanical survey can provide insights on how people utilized and disposed of their local plant resources and this can feed back into interpretations of archaeological evidence. Here ethnobotanic data from different regions of Thailand are employed to better understand the exploitation of gathered and garden economic plants in the context of traditional village systems where there is often a blurred line between the wild and the domestic and no clear division between the garden and the forest. This information is used in turn, to understand archaeobotanical results from Rach Nui, a Neolithic settled non-agricultural site in Vietnam, and Non Ban Jak, an Iron Age site with a rice farming economy in Northeast Thailand.