Addressing redundancy and multiplicity in starch assemblages: A multivariate statistical analysis of native plants from the Batuco wetland (Central Chile)

Abstract

In paleoethnobotanical studies, reference collections of bio-particles play a crucial role in the taxonomic identification of plants, and starch grains are among the most widely used. Specifically, the issues of redundancy, multiplicity, and inter-individual variation in starch production have led us to propose a statistical method to identify specific morphotypes and inter-species morphological redundancies for six native wild plants of the Batuco lagoon-wetlands. The reference collection was applied to a residue analysis of ceramic sherds from the BAT01 site in the same area, successfully identifying four of the six species.