ANGA Workshop Day 2: Phytoliths and Starch

A bit of starch and a lot of phytolith, actually.

For those of you who don't know, phytoliths are microscopic objects produced by plants containing silica. This is why they preserve really well and cal be found in sediments and rocks up to a million years old. Starch on the other hand are also made by plants, but are easily degraded by enzymes that occur everywhere. A lot do survive though and can be used like phytoliths and pollen to tell a lot about the past.

After a basic introduction to them, we discussed the very recent developments in their use in research and the types of questions we can examine by using these very old residues. This is quite relevant to my Honours research and throughout the day, a lot of new avenues to pursue opened up. I won't bore people with the finer details of these, because even among the participants of the workshop, I think there were moments of confusion over some of the finer details that were raised. And honestly, a lot of the scientific details probably didn't even register with some people.

The interest was particularly taxed after lunch, when we had a very prolonged session of looking at photo slides of reference material for phytoliths - not terribly interesting to the untrained eye. Everyone (including the presenter) was relieved at afternoon tea, before a more interesting practical session afterwards involving mashing up plant material in pestles and mortars.

Today's afternoon feature was a bananary biscuit, which was appropriate as we discussed banana domestication in Papua New Guinea today.